are we the masters?

 Its often good to have a background in biology to be able to ask questions like: who is in charge

"However, we should never forget the hard-won cautionary lessons of history. Alchemy was not only a proto-science, but also a “hyper-science” that overpromised and underdelivered. Astrological predictions were taken so seriously that life had to adapt to theory, instead of the other way around. Unfortunately, modern society is not free from such magical thinking, putting too much confidence in omnipotent algorithms, without critically questioning their logical or ethical basis." (citation)

and are we then to become like wheat to the AI? Because wheat could be see as having enslaved humans as propagators and carers for it.

Worthy thought right there about the basis of symbiosis.

If we defer to the new religion to run our lives we need to ask basic questions like "is the machine a good parent".

Good Morning

The Big Question

I read this Guardian article this morning and it resonated with some of my views. Without reading too much into the word "meaning" in this it makes the important point of "we're all we've got"and perhaps we should stop thinking about SciFi, stop placing God as the center and start thinking about humanity as the center ... 

I would place religion as a key player in our environmental problems as well as our problems of getting along together. Religions (particularly the Abrahamic stemmed faiths) somehow are key in fostering the idea that somehow "God" and the "Final Conflict" are what we were created for.

So its not for the prudent management of our selves and our world, its somehow about pleasing God. Its almost as if all religions want to celebrate our death as the sacrifice for God.

To me this is complete madness.

The reality as I see it is that we have (in the last few dozen years) become truly world changing agents and are slowly waking up to that fact. 

We have to realise that if we fuck up here we fall forever, there is no "new land" to migrate to.

We need to get rid of the toxic mental disease at the heart of most of religion (all or most of them really) and make anthropocentric views the center of what's important.

Now to be clear I am not saying that  there is no God, what I am saying is that the human views of God are wrong. If we continue to rely on the ideas of a bunch of illiterate un-educated sheep shaggers and War Lords to inform us of what God is then we're locked into a thinking from 2000 years ago which is entirely out of step with human capacity right now.

investment watches

Its been a while since my last post here and so I thought I'd whack something together which I was thinking about a topic that came up in an internet discussion. The topic was "will this watch make a good investment".  Note: not this watch

but it sure is a nice watch.

Anyway, I see this being bantered around on various watch discussion sites where an amount of intellectual self delusion goes on (commonly I call this watch wanking).

A well known watch review site did an article (here) about the resale values of Rolex models and identified some pretty stand out models. I thought I'd discuss a the stand out model of the Daytona 116520 White.

As you can see from their chart (which I've edited to remove distraction) that seems to have grown in price from around US$13,000 when new to nearly US$30,000 now.

A KingWang type would just leap on that and go WOW ... I can make a packet on a watch.

Lets just do a little more analysis depth than that simplistic wanking, hmm? So to be able to get that sort of growth you had to know in advance which watches would go up and which would not. Notice that the Cellini Time actually went down in cost over the time between release and used price researched for their article (2020).

Now the Daytona was made in 1963, which means that you'd have had to keep it not only in good order, but either proof of service or a recent service done if you wanted to get that money. Such things are  not free. Financial people call this "cost of carry".

Now lets look at what would have happened if you'd put $13,000 down on something else, lets say good old fashioned gold. Now how much gold would you get in 1968? 

Back in 1968 gold was about US$39 per oz, that $13,000 works out to be about 342oz of gold (people didn't buy fractions of an Oz ) or nearly 11kg - that should suddenly scream out to you how much that actually is.

So now, if you'd put aside that gold, what would that be worth today? Well at US$2,424 per oz at the moment of writing means you would have US$829,008. Yes, thats eight hundred and twenty nine thousand and eight dollars.  That is because gold has risen like this since even the 70's

So you could now go out and buy 27 Daytonas and still have change.

Amusingly gold isn't even considered a good investment ... 

To make matters worse the inflation adjusted value of the Daytona that you spent half a  median house  price buying has not even kept place with inflation, because that would mean it would cost $102,472.13 in todays purchasing power ... making the current price about a third of what you'd paid for it.

Watches as an investment? Laugh ... I nearly shat.

Arlec PC800: how to delete a program

If you have one of these (or something similar with different branding) you may want occasionally to delete a specific program (emptying it), while not disturbing your other programs.

Well its not in the manual but I discovered it by accident. You press the Manual button with the progam you want to delete showing. Like this

hope that helps