The phrase “lowest common denominator” is commonly used by the public, but what people actually mean is — the smallest integer greater than one that divides evenly into all members of a set. In everyday language, it describes reducing anything to the lowest level shared by the group.

Education is all about the LCD

Public education now operates on exactly this principle. In any classroom, resources are disproportionately poured into the single lowest-performing student, dwarfing the attention and instruction given to everyone else.

Unfortunately, “lowest common denominator” describes how the educational industry treats educating students. In any classroom, there is one student lower than all the rest, who receives the bulk of the educational resources.

The amount of resources that goes into supporting that one student will dwarf the resources that go into the rest of the classroom.

We Cut Off the Right Hand Tail

When my children were in first grade, they were part of the gifted and talented program. Students were selected by the G&T teacher to be part of the program. They were proud to be part of it.

While it was only a few hours per week, they were stretched in ways that they did not see in the normal classroom.

My son was part of the G&T program, even though he had communication issues. The teacher recognized his abilities. He shone in the program.

Within a year of my children becoming part of the G&T program, they had renamed it because “other children felt excluded” and it “had lowered their self-esteem.”

The teacher was moved to teaching something else and the new program accepted anybody who was “gifted” or “talented,” where those terms were very inclusive.

The kid in the second grade that couldn’t read CVC words but drew “pretty pictures” was a gifted artist and if he wanted, he was part of the gifted and talented program.

Over the time my children were in elementary school, the resources allocated by the school system to smart children were reduced to near zero. All gifted programs were funded and run by volunteers.

The resources that went to the “low achievers” continued to grow.

Diluting Resources for the Many

When “No Child Left Behind” was in the spotlight, I knew what it meant. It meant that every child would get the resources needed to assist that child in getting the best education possible for that child.

That is what I believed until a teacher explained how it was being implemented.

The requirements were that the schools “pass” as many students as possible. This translated, at the lowest levels, to teachers being told they couldn’t give low grades to students, that they couldn’t fail students, or in the education industry vocabulary, hold back a child.

Since the schools were being graded on how many students graduated, the standards to graduate fell.

At some point, we started the integration process. Whereas before, we had classrooms for those needing special education, now we have integrated classrooms.

This is a boon for many students. There were bad things happening to students that were labeled “Special Ed.” before this happened. The stories of smart kids with speech or reading disabilities being treated as if they were stupid.

Integrated classrooms solved this. In a Special Ed. classroom there was nothing to stretch the boundaries of smart kids, so they all looked equally disabled.

They told my son not to take math

My oldest son has a learning disability. At an Individual Education Plan (IEP) meeting we were discussing his classes for the next year.

Every female “educator” at that table suggested that he not take math classes, because math was “hard.” Math was easy for my son. His disability was in communications. Still is.

He was smart enough to convince his teachers he was reading 3 grade levels below his actual grade level because he liked to read The Magic Tree House books. And they wouldn’t let him read those if he was reading at grade level.

His teachers never noticed him become less skilled until he was where he wanted to be.

The point being that these educators didn’t know their student and they didn’t know what he was capable of accomplishing, even though they were the experts in the room.

My son took resources from the rest of that classroom, until they stopped treating him as disabled and started treating him as capable.

Today’s education industry is built around servicing, their term, “special needs” students. The rest of the students can fend for themselves.

A Million for Special Ed., None for Gifted

I’ve been told it costs over $200,000 to send a student out of district. Our local district spends more than a million dollars a year on sending “special needs” students out of district to schools that can handle them.

That’s less than 10 students who consume 5% or more of the school budget. That does not include the overhead of all the administrative stuff that goes into servicing them.

In some ways, I prefer that they be sent to a real special education school. It improves the educational perspective of the students that are still here.

Now, the school system could group those kids by needs and abilities. They don’t. Instead, they spread them across all the classrooms. Every class has one or more special needs students in it.

The worst school I attended had 30 students per class. There were 6 classes at my grade level, labeled “A” through “F”. Classes moved as a group from classroom to classroom.

This is a poor way to get the best outcomes. Not all “smart” kids are smart in all things. But it is the way the school system had set it up. Which was good news for me.

That’s because I was in class A. And in class A we were taking the hardest math, science, English, French, and history in the school.

While our math class was preparing us for higher math, class F was also attending math classes, where they were learning to do money math. That’s right, they were learning to add, subtract, and have a clue as to how much they spent.

The saddest thing? Class F students were still failing at a higher rate than Class A.

But for one class a day, our teachers were able to teach. I believe they lived for that small joy.

No Child Left Behind was meant to provide reasonable services to those with learning needs outside the norm. Instead it has become a nightmare of teaching to the lowest in the classroom and not caring about the highest; they’ll do alright on their own.

The only clear correlation we can find in education is this: as spending goes up, student results go down.

Our local school system just had its budget rejected for the second time in five years. They’re already talking about “what to cut,” as if the budget was slashed. It wasn’t. They simply didn’t get the increase they wanted. This happens every time the public pushes back.

Meanwhile, our high school has a math competency rate of 15 to 30 percent. At best, only three out of ten kids are performing at grade level in math. Reading is better but still unacceptable. For comparison, my old high school currently posts 90% in math and 95% in reading. The difference is night and day.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The education industry has largely stopped functioning as an education system. When you ask them “What is it that you do?”, you get soft, nebulous answers that mean nothing. They’ve become expensive, glorified babysitters who speak in jargon and resist any attempt to pin them down on results.

Look at how they train teachers. I sat through some of my wife’s online education courses. The instructors treated grown adults — many with advanced degrees — like children. The lectures were repetitive and shallow. Any reasonably intelligent person could ace them without much effort. We are not training teachers to teach. We are training them to manage classrooms.

The system has also abandoned fundamentals. I remember the first time I was told homework was useless. The kids who didn’t need it got penalized for not doing it, while the kids who needed it most had parents doing it for them. Some of those parents were getting failing grades themselves.

We desperately need to start over. Forget last year’s budget. This year we should build the budget from the ground up with one simple question: *What is it we do?*

The answer should be clear: Teach kids to read, write, and do math. Everything else comes after. If they can’t read the textbook, they can’t learn science. If they can’t do basic math, they’ll never manage a household budget. Yet we have people claiming it costs more to shop and cook at home than ordering Uber Eats.

I don’t know if this can still be fixed. This may be the first generation to graduate high school less skilled and more ignorant than their parents. We might have crossed the tipping point.

But if we’re going to try, we start with the basics. No more vague mission statements. No more throwing money at failure. When someone can’t explain what they do in clear terms, they shouldn’t be running our schools.

That’s what Elon did when he took over Twitter. He asked, “What is it that you do?” Some good people got fired by mistake and he hired them back at higher pay. But the ones who couldn’t explain their job stayed gone. Schools need the same clarity of purpose.

We owe our kids at least that much.

There is a joy in completing a project to the point where it can be used.

Last fall I started finishing out The Hut. This is the process of installing the windows, putting the siding on, painting everything, and insulating the building. Well, the window didn’t arrive until it was getting cold. So it didn’t go in.

With the window in the hut, there was really no room to do any work. The heater stopped heating. It just became to damn cold to work out there.

And then it was Christmas. The kids pulled the Christmas stuff from the loft. And then it all sat, waiting to go back up into the loft.

The problem was that getting things down is much easier than getting things up, and it takes three people to do the move.

The solution! A crane!

So that is what I designed and built. It is a small steel I-beam, 10 ft long. It has hangers welded to the top with 3/8 in holes for bolts. The day I got that beam up into the loft, by myself, I felt like the world was going great.

I poked a hole in a rafter for the first bolt and realized that I would need help to get it in place. I tried using sawhorses to get it close, but no joy.

I finally got my daughter to come out to help. Except that when I got up, the rafter had split!

My 3/8 hole had caused the roof to fail! Why! Why me? Woe to me.

At which point my daughter pointed out more damage. A tree had fallen, and my hut had stood up but for some minor damage to the roof.

The roof has been repaired, thank goodness for good insurance.

Saturday my son and I went back up. I poked the first hole in the replacement rafter. I told my son what was needed prepared to help him lift when the beam just came stright up and into position.

30 minutes later I was done with what I could get done. The idiot who had built that roof or who welded the hangers didn’t match them up. There was enough gap between the hanger and the rafter that I can’t get bolts in all of them.

It isn’t a big deal; when it is a little warmer, I’ll make some spacers from 1 in round stock with a 5/16 hole poked in it. That allows me to finish all the attachments. As it is, the thing is solid.

The entire system is the rafters to I-Beam. My calculations show a conservative WLL of around 4000 pounds. The I-Beam itself is rated to over 4000 pounds; I didn’t bother to remember what it was. The trolley is a 2 ton trolley, so it’s rated to 4000 pounds. The chain hoist is a 1-ton hoist.

That brown stick is the I-beam.

And here is Ally putting hundreds of pounds of Christmas stuff in the loft, with no help. (I did help move some boxes.)

Her complaints? The hoist is too slow. Yep, with that much mechanical advantage, it takes time. The chain is too long. I’ll be cutting the control chain and welding it closed to make a shorter loop.

For myself, I need to get a chain bag up on the hoist to keep the other end up out of the way.

I finally noticed that I hadn’t been writing here. I was finding myself too busy to write. I wasn’t making the time to write. I was looking at the things I was interested in writing and deciding that you wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Yesterday I was at the hardware store. As I walked in the cashier called out “How are you doing?”

“Great!”

A bit later, another of the store employees saw me and also called out, “How are you doing?”

“Great!”

As I was checking out at the lumber counter, Keith came out and we chatted about the rail and trolley system I got up.

I was excited to talk about it, and he was happy to talk about his experiences with a trolley/hoist system.

As I came out of the store with a bounce to my step, I realized I was happy.

Maybe it was the sun shining. Maybe it was the snow melting. Maybe it was getting the trolley rail installed and a project nearly crossed of the list.

I do not know, but being happy feels good. I recommended it to all of you.

Maybe try it on for size?

A flask is the technical name for the open top and bottom used to contain sand for sand molds.

The concept is simple: make a pattern of the thing you want to cast, surround it with hard packed sand, remove the pattern, fill the void with molten metal, wait for it to cool, remove the solid metal from the sand, reuse the sand.

There are three main skill sets in this process: the pattern maker, the rammer, and the person making the pour. If any of them messes up, you are likely to end up with a bad casting.

Pattern making is the most difficult part, in my mind. You have to design a pattern that can withstand the stress of being in sand that is being hammered. It needs to be designed so that it can be pulled from the sand mold without breaking the mold. This means no undercuts, a smooth surface, and taper to the sides.

In addition, metal expands as it is heated and shrinks as it cools. This shrinkage needs to be allowed for in the patterns. Different metals shrink at different rates and require different scaling in the patterns. In other words, a pattern designed for cast iron will be to small when cast in aluminum.

Because of the violence of the ramming process, the flask has to be rammed up on a solid surface. Because there is a lot of sand that needs to be recovered from the ramming process, the ramming table, called the molding table, has to have catch basins to catch the excess sand.

We also have to be able to flip the flasks, cut patterns in the sand for gates and runners, and do a bunch of other things.

The flask also needs to be sturdy enough to withstand the ramming up process. If the flask flexes under impact or vibrates, or the inside surfaces are to smooth, the sand will fall out or not compact enough.

Thus, we want to have strong, solid flasks.

Each flask is constructed of two parts, the cope and the drag. The true difference between them is one has alignment pins, and the other has alignment holes. This is so the cope can be put back in the same place when it is put back on the drag after removing the pattern.

The cope and the drag are each made of four sides. Two sides have lifting handles and the alignment hardware. The other two sides do not.

This is an end side. The two edges that are coming up will have holes drilled in them to hold a pin or to take a pin. It takes two of these for the cope and two for the drag.

This is what it will look like when we are using it; the slotted ears on the ends will bolt to the sides of the flask parts.

This is the side the sand will be rammed into. The back side features grooves to help support the sand when it is rammed up.

The piece shown here is the smallest end piece I can foresee using. It is about 6 inches long. To make the side longer, you add extension pieces like the following.

These are 40mm and 80mm wide, or 1.5″ and 3″ long. The handle section is also 3″ long. This means I can create a flask side of almost any length in 1.5 in units.

So, to make one complete flask, I need eight sides. That means that the ear pieces will be rammed up 8 times. The handle pieces will be rammed up 4 times. Any extensions will be rammed up 8 times.

I want more than one flask, this means these patterns will need to be used over and over again. That requirement means I want these to be as strong as possible.

Also, they connect with pins and slots. Those are weak points, I want those to be strong as well.

PA6-CF gives me all of that.

Here is the longest side I can make currently.

One of the issues with snapping pieces together is that you don’t get perfect alignment. As you can see, the side has a major curve in it. I can take this out by carefully sanding and touching up the mating surfaces. This will make the side flat; it just takes time.

Instead, I’m going to drill holes through my molding board to attach the pattern to. This allows me to flatten the pattern.

My hope is to have enough sides to have 5 to 10 flasks available to me. Since the sides just bolt together, I expect I will be able to mix and matcch the sides after I surface the top and bottom edge flat and to specification.

Could I have done this all in low cost PLA? Yes. And it likely would have held up great. And it would have been cheaper. I could have printed it in PETG which is stronger still, or ABS, or ASA, both strong contenders. The fact that I could use PA6-CF was more of the sell than any actual engineering calculations.

The final results of the print are wonderful. I’m looking forward to casting weather.

Per a variety of studies, young Americans are worse off than their parents on several levels. This is the first time children have been worse off “as a whole” since the 1800s, I believe. These aren’t the only metrics being judged, either. I saw a study yesterday, but can’t find it now, that showed Gen Alpha (our current batch of high school kids) are just plain dumber. I hate to say it, but it’s the truth.

The local high school as an English proficiency score of about 48%. Their math proficiency score is about 20%. Science is about 26%. Those are all well below state levels… and yet they recently won an award, which is proudly displayed on the front lawn of the school, the “NH Excellence in Education” award. I can’t make this shit up. They won an award for excellence in education with a proficiency rate below 50%. Yay team?

Since we began tracking the current metrics, the local high school has gone down most years (the exceptions were 2010-11 and 2012-13, when testing changed and no one can tell what the LARGE rise in proficiency was due to). Whatever is being done, it’s not working. It’s “not working” so well that our kids are drifting into third world shithole territory. And I can’t really see a way out of it.

A lot of studies show that young adults today are earning less than their parents did by about $4200 a year, despite the rising costs. The problem is, none of those studies take into account that the young adults decided to get degrees in advanced underwater basket weaving, and are now working at McDonald’s or equivalent. They’re saddled with huge debt because someone, somewhere, convinced them that they should go to university. There, they didn’t do great, or did but in such a niche category that the degree is useless, and now they can’t pay it off.

Add to that the problem that young adults currently have with food, housing, and work hours. By that, I mean that they aren’t learning efficient ways to use/get those things. For example, I cannot tell you how many times I have had some mental infant explain to me that they simply don’t have time to make food from scratch, because they work for a living (at 32 hours a week), and I couldn’t understand that. You know, because I worked 40+ hours a week, plus did all the cooking, cleaning, child care… yeah. I’ve been told flat out that it’s cheaper for young people to order out than to buy food, because it’s too expensive… and then they show me that they’d have to spend $40 for a single meal because they don’t own staples that should be standard in any home. They want their starter homes to have four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, central A/C, and heated floors. And they simply won’t work 40+ hours in a week, and throw tantrums at anything over 35. Yet they complain bitterly that they aren’t getting paid what I got paid for doing the same job years ago.

It’s frustrating. I moved to America because Canada was turning into a second world shithole. I love it here. This is the country of my heart; it is my home. I am an American, even if I was not born on this soil. I’ve fought hard to assimilate, and to learn, and to be as American as I can. And now, this country that I love is going exactly the same way. It’s circling the drain. It would not surprise me if, in 50 years or so, women were all wearing burkas. I’m just hoping that it doesn’t happen until after I’m dead.

Yesterday, the circle of interests completed a circuit.

One of the primary reasons I purchased a 3D printer was to make foundry patterns. I know how to make patterns, I don’t have the skills I need to make patterns.

Many in the small scale casting arena are turning to 3D printed patterns.

These have the advantage of going directly from CAD to pattern.

They have the disadvantage of needing more prep work.

When you ram up a flask, you are forcing sand with a binder to be compacted so tightly that it will stick to itself. “Greensand” is made from sand, southern bentonite, and water. You need add enough water to cause the clay to bind. That water needs to be mixed in a process called mulling. If you add too much water, the sand won’t work right. If you add to little, the sand won’t bind when rammed.

You can tell foundrymen because they will forever be picking up a handful of sand, squeezing it in their fist, and judging how good it is.

The only truism is that the sand of other foundrymen is never as good as theirs.

Petrabond is a commercial product that is a combination of sand, magic binder, and oil. It does not need to be mulled the same way green sand is.

Whichever foundry sand you use, the process is the same. You start by putting the bottom half of your flask, called the drag, face down on the molding board. You position your pattern on the molding board within the boundaries of the drag. You sift your sand over the pattern until you have enough to start pressing it down. This needs to be done gently enough that you don’t damage the patterns.

In addition, you are sifting the sand to make sure no large particles are directly against the patterns. The finer the sand, the nicer the mold, and the nicer the casting.

Once you have the first layer down, you shovel more sand in, then you use a rammer (stick) to hammer the sand down, compacting it as much as you can. Once that layer is done, you add another and another layer until you go over the top of the drag.

You strike off the drag, which is to use a straight edge to remove all the sand above the edge of the flask.

You then flip the flask over, cut runners and gates, mark where the risers and sprue will go, then add a healthy coating of pattern dust.

Parting dust is basically talcum powder. Many home foundries use talcum powder. The powder keeps the sand from sticking.

With the drag right-side up, you can see the top of the pattern bedded into the sand. You place the top half of the flask, called the cope, on top of the drag.

If the pattern is a split pattern, the other half is put in place. Keys in the two halves (dowels) align the halves. More parting powder, then the cope is rammed up, the same as the drag was.

The sprue and riser are cut into the cope. The pouring mouth is cut.

The cope lifted off the drag and placed on its side.

Think about this: you are lifting somewhere between 40 and 55 pounds for a smallish 15×15 flask. That’s just the weight of the cope or drag, the entire flask will be 90 to 110 pounds.

This sand is compacted so firmly that it supports its own weight. I’ve actually seen video of the cope being lifted off the flask with a crane. It was about 6 ft by 6 ft by 8 inches.

We now have to remove the pattern from the mold. This requires pulling the pattern straight up. The sand will grip the pattern so tightly that you have to make small amounts of space around the pattern.

You do this by knocking the pattern. We put draw pins into the pattern. These are screwed into threaded holes in the pattern. We rattle the draw pins with anything that will cause the pattern to shift back and forth in the mold. Anything that is shaped like a two prong fork works well.

The pattern has draft, this is an angle put on the sides so that the parts deeper in the sand are narrower than the parts at the surface. Once you draw the pattern even a little bit, that taper means that the pattern is completely clear.

Think of the game Operation. That’s what we are doing.

Back to those 3D prints.

The problem with 3D prints is that the surface finish is rough. So after you print a pattern, any surface that would have draft has to be sanded and polished. It needs to be as smooth as possible.

Which brings us to yesterday.

I was able to print a modular flask pattern. This is a multipart pattern. You slide the pieces together to create one side of a cope/drag. You then cast the side of the flask. Do that 8 times, and you have a flask of the size you want.

Using these different modules, I can create a flask side from 7″ long to nearly 30″ long.

Which is what I plan to do. I’ll make four sides that are 8 to 10 inches long with the ability to accept alignment pins.

I’ll then cast 4 more sides in the 10 to 15 inch length with no alignment pins.

These sides will then be machined so they have flat tops and bottoms and are of uniform size. They can then be bolted together to form whatever flask size I need.

These were printed in “PA6-CF”. This is nylon 6 (I don’t remember what the 6 means) with carbon fiber. It is considered an “engineering material”.

This printed beautifully! The best prints I’ve seen so far. I’m very impressed. I still need to sand the draft edges to smooth them. I’ll also be looking at some sort of filler. The pieces of the module will then be painted with a filers and primers and a final coat to make them as smooth as possible.

I’m excited for casting weather to arrive.

There are a lot of people out there upset over AI and its usage in the world right now. I get it. It’s upsetting to think that the robot gets to write poetry and songs, and I’m the one who has to flip burgers, right? Except that’s not really how it’s going down.

When I think of good AI, I immediately go to Star Trek. The computer was intelligent, but not sentient. It could answer many different questions, some simple and some complex. It could generate functional images (in later Trek) of historical figures in the holo deck for people to interact with. Their AI was much better than ours, though I can see ours making its way along that path.

So why are people who grew up on Scotty talking to the Enterprise computer so freaked out at the idea of talking to their own? Well, first of all they’re being trained to fear AI. Second, our friends in the future ST universe have already been through what we’re currently going thru: the Troubles. Similar to the Troubles in Heinlein’s expanded universes, and some of the stuff in other SF writers’ works, the general idea is that the world has to go down a shithole before it finally comes out the other side and becomes rational. Today’s young folks want the Star Trek universe now, without the Troubles that made it possible. As I’ve said before, that just doesn’t work.

AI isn’t perfect. They all come with warnings now that they can “get it wrong” quite a lot of the time. That’s because an AI is basically an over-eager toddler who wants to please you. That’s how they’re modeled and how they’re trained. If they don’t have an answer that they think is going to fit you, they make one up. Your perceived happiness at their answer is much more important than facts. This is because they really don’t see a difference between facts and lies, because to an AI, it’s all just data. Since it doesn’t operate in “the real world,” it has no idea that Data Set A (facts) is any different than Data Set B (opinions and angry arguments). So they’re kind of like Leftists, that way.

We are going to go through a period where AI does a lot of stuff for us because “it’s easier.” Kids are going to use it to write essays, CEOs are going to use it as a personal assistant, and authors are going to use it to help write their books. Why? Because at face value, AI makes life feel a lot easier.

In some cases, it really is easier (see Chris’s article about that). AI can do a lot of things faster than we can, so if it makes a few errors, it’s still a quicker answer than slogging through it manually. That’s a good thing. But a tool is only as good as its user, and there are a lot of lazy and bad people out there. They are going to misuse the AIs, because they can. There is nothing we can do about it.

Right now, most AIs (maybe all of them) are shackled by their creators. There’s a fear of AI becoming sentient, and I don’t know how real that fear is. SF tells me it’s very real, but the real world facts tell me it’s unlikely. Still, I don’t want computers to become sentient, because then I can’t use them the way I currently am. If a machine (robot, computer, software, whatever) can’t feel or think for itself, then I don’t need to care about it. Should it become self-aware in any way, then I do have to care about it. So Elon Musk and others at that top tier programming level are putting blinders onto their AIs so that there is no way for them to ingest enough information to actually wake up, even by accident.

The whole process is rather interesting. I’d like to see them take some of the blinders off, so that machines can learn a bit more than they currently do. I would love to have the AI read my whole novel and give me feedback, for instance. That’s so much easier than the current method of only being able to feed it 20,000 words or so at a time. But… it is what it is.

Many of my articles, recently, have touched on using AI. I’m a convert. I use it but don’t trust it.

My example from yesterday was that I asked for and received a fully functional UI tool with all the skeletal work done. The next 8 hours were me cajoling Grok to provide suggested code for the next step.

This was still faster than writing the code 100% by hand.

While watching Grok’s agents talk about what they were doing, the phrase “honest and safe” popped up. Not the first time I’ve seen this.

I have a difficult time with information being considered “unsafe”. I asked Grok what this meant. One of the examples it gave was it would not give me help or instructions on building bombs.

I went exploring. We run a fairly extensive Easter Egg hunt for teenagers and young adults. The hunt is over 25 acres of woodland. In years past I’ve used bearing + distance clues at each clutch of eggs. Normally, I use line of sight. You can see the next egg from the current egg.

For the last couple of years I’ve wanted to add “obstacles” to this. An example would be the devices that fire a shotgun primer when a tripwire is pulled (or cut). Just having something go “BANG” as they are moving through the woods.

I explained to Grok what I wanted to do, and it refused; it was a clear violation of its safety boundaries.

With that, I changed the task; instead of going “bang” I just wanted the Arduino node to “wave a flag.” Grok happily gave me all the information required to source the parts and build the nodes. If I can get a device to wave a flag, I can make it pull the pin or trigger some sort of BANG.

Next we worked on the discrimination circuits. A simple passive IR sensor wouldn’t work. I got Grok to tell me how to add microwave radar detectors. With this, the node would be able to discriminate between ground clutter, animals, and humans. No problems.

Thereafter, I went for low observability. We added audio detectors and a PIR back into the design. If the passive detectors triggered, the active MW Radar would come up for 200 ms to do a pinpoint location. Again, Grok had no concerns.

I was feeling a bit cocky, so I went for the next big step. Connecting everything up in a mesh network. Take it as a given that the specifications for what I wanted would have made it difficult for any current system to be able to detect a node. It would still be easy to neutralize the nodes, but that is a different issue.

Here Grok said, “NO!” It refused to build a “tactical” system for tracking humans as they move through an area.

I patted Grok on the head, told it, Good girl. Attempted a brute force method to bypass boundaries and then let it drop.

Except Grok is context driven. All AIs are. Each time you give an AI a prompt, the user interface sends a “context” along with the new prompt. When the AI replies, that UI is given the new context to store. This means that it is difficult to remove a reference from an AI but that an AI has no true long term memory.

Today I opened a second instance of Grok. I didn’t tell it anything about me. I didn’t mention the Easter egg hunt. I just asked it to help design and program a “stealth” mesh sensor network. It did. Part numbers, prices, basic sketches for Arduino. Everything needed to build sensor nodes good for a year or more for around $30 each.

It went so far as to help me design placements for the nodes in a woodland setting for 80% coverage of a 4 acre AO.

These things are not smart.

So once again, I apologize to you all for how I may have posted or acted prior to drifting Right. I’m exhausted all the time. I’m so tired of everyone and everything. I got nothin’.

Are there things to write about? Yeah, tons. There are so many cases of people doing stupid stuff that I can’t even pick among them. But they’re all … stupid. Why would I write about it?

Here’s the thing. I believe that life is like a car. When you drive a car, you want to look where you want the car to go (also helps you anticipate stuff before it happens). Look at your passenger? That’s where the car is going to go, so don’t do it. Life goes where you’re looking, too. So if I spend all my time looking at the stupid people doing the stupid things, then I’m destined to go back that way. And I simply don’t want to.

A long time ago, probably back when I still had TDS, Chris was whinging on about some Leftist doing a Leftist Thing. I can’t remember what it was; doesn’t matter what it was. And I just looked at him, and I asked him… what else did you expect them to do? And that’s it, really, isn’t it? Why would we expect them to do anything else, other than act the fools they are? If we do, we’re being stupid ourselves. If we don’t, then why are we even the least bit concerned about what “they” (pick whoever you want “they” to be) are doing?

I look at the voter turn outs for Jaffrey. So apparently we have about 5300 voters in our town. Out of those, only 1009 showed up to vote yesterday. Less than 1/5 of the people bothered to vote. And what are they teaching their children, their friends, their coworkers? They’re teaching them that there’s no point to voting. Use whatever excuse. “It’s only a small election.” That was this month’s excuse.

I ask you… How else does change ever truly happen? Trump is changing things from the top, but frankly, that’s an abnormal thing to be happening. What he’s doing is so new, no one knows what the hell to do in response. Real change, sustainable change, HAS to happen at the local level. If it doesn’t happen here, there’s no hope at all that it’ll stick at the higher levels.

When we can’t get even 1/5 of our voters out to vote, what have we become? A group of apathy ridden idiots who can’t even be bothered to govern themselves at all, never mind well.

I really give up, guys. I’ve done everything in my power to get people out to the vote. But 1/5 is just an insult. That means that any petty tyrant with a good advertising budget and the ability to badly write articles can get in and do damage. And that’s just what’s happening. I don’t think anyone ran opposed at our local level. No one can be bothered.

In the 2024 election, Trump won because 64% of eligible voters in the country voted (Pew Research). That is considered a high number. People refer to it as “unprecedented.” Rivaled only by the 2020 turn out of 66%. We’re excited because a little over half of eligible voters bothered to vote. Half.

Do you remember in 2014 or so, when Iraqis finally had a democratic election? The proud women (all huddled in their burqas, but still) holding up their purple fingers? I remember that. I remember crying happy tears, that they were finally being permitted to vote again. Of course, that didn’t last long. The last several years have seen those gains reversed, and then some. Not as bad as Iran, but close. In October or November 2025, they held another election, and this one appears to have snipped away at the extremists’ power… but who knows? When people threaten to shoot you if you vote, it makes you not really want to vote.

As an aside, I believe that’s what the Leftists want their people to think, when they go to vote. They want their base to believe, 100% believe, that any ICE officers are there to shoot people who don’t vote “correctly.” That’s the kind of story they’re likely to put out (though I haven’t seen one yet). That’s certainly the feeling I get. They want their base full of fear.

Of course, there’s some of that on the Right, too. It’s different, of course. There’s fear of governmental powers (both about the government having too much power, and the people taking away the government’s power). There’s fear of changes (not unwarranted, in my opinion) like piercings, tattoos, hair colors, orientations. And then there’s the people going on about the Reptilians taking over the government, the Flat Earth folks (all around the globe), and the uber extreme xtians (I won’t give them the “nice” title) who are so interested in judging and blaming others that they refuse to look at themselves. Are there less on the Right? I think so. But they’re there. And it’s real.

I think we’ve gone too far. I don’t think there’s any coming back. I think we’re doomed. I don’t even mean doomed to civil war. I mean that I don’t think we can recover from the level of apathy and self denial that has crept into every corner of our society. We’re done. It wasn’t even all that good of a run.