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“Your home is two thousand, three hundred and twenty-five square feet. Current IRS code allows us to reduce your taxable income by a percentage of your workspace relative to the overall size of your house.” – The Accountant

How long do leftovers have to be in the fridge before I can count them as dependents?  Asking for a friend.

Spent all day doing taxes and money stuff.  Regular post on Wednesday, but please enjoy these tax-related memes I found.  Regular post on Wednesday.

“I refuse to believe that I’m only here because I popped out of your imagina….” [poof] – John Dies at the End

So, it’s been a very, very long week. Not at all bad, in fact several things are coming together that are pretty cool.

But.

No time to create a proper post, so I’ll just share some more A.I. work, which will (probably) be the last A.I. stuff for a while. These are comics made by A.I. about itself, and appeared at the X page of Josie Kins (LINK).

Me? I do know that A.I. is not what humans would call conscious, yet I would also say exactly that about people who couldn’t understand conditional hypothetical arguments (how would you feel if you didn’t eat breakfast).

Does A.I. feel? It looks like not. It is, more than anything, very advanced pattern matching. There is a story, going back in time, of the Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical paradox that explores questions of identity and persistence over time. It originates from a thought experiment described by Plutarch, who is Greek and also dead.

Theseus, the mythical Greek hero and brother of Thesaurus, has a ship that is maintained, repaired, conserved, fixed, and preserved over many years. As parts of the ship decay, they are replaced with new parts. Eventually, every original piece—planks, mast, sails—is replaced.

The question arises: Is it still the same ship?

The paradox deepens when considering a second scenario: What if the discarded original parts of the ship are collected and reassembled into another ship? Which ship, if either, is the true Ship of Theseus—the one with all new parts but continuous maintenance, or the one rebuilt from the original materials but looking like it was ridden hard and put away wet?

Does an object’s essence lie in its physical components, its form, its function, or its history? Most of the cells of my body have been replaced. Yet, here I am, the Ship of Wilder’s consciousness. And do I do more than pattern match?

Tough questions. What happens if A.I. becomes a vessel of works of man, but man himself is absent? Will it laugh at my jokes?

Regardless, here are some comics that A.I. drew about itself. Enjoy!

Probably back next week.  Fingers crossed.

Got home, working on tonight’s show, and The Mrs. said, “Nope.  I’m taking the week off due to needing sleep.”  I’m betting we’re back in the saddle next week.  Tonight, please enjoy these memes:

No podcast tonight.  Next week, hopefully, the week after, nearly certain.  Enjoy these memes instead!

“Get out your pocketbooks and remember it’s all for charity.” – Groundhog Day

I told that joke to my blind friend and he didn’t see the humor in it.

As we pass through this next week, I’d like to remind everyone that Trump hasn’t been in office even a single month (seventeen years for GloboLeftists) at this point.  One argument that I’ve seen the GloboLeft chattering class attempt to make is that USAID® is “too small to worry about, it’s less than 1% of the budget”.

This is a continual talking point, so you know that the GloboLeftElite is coordinating them to make this point.

So, we are presented with the Paradox of Federal Spending as presented by the GloboLeftElite:  “Every small budget cut is too small to matter, and every large budget cut is impossible to make.”  I supposed I should call it Schrödinger’s Budget.

But in context, USAID™ funding is fifty billion dollars.  Doing the math, that’s $600 for a family of four.  .

Every year.

So, too small to matter?

No, $600 would matter to a lot of folks.  I mean, that’s a dozen eggs nowadays.

That seemed really funny in 2003.

But there is a much, much bigger picture here.

If the family of four had that extra $600, would they donate it?

• Would they donate it to an AIDS clinic in South Africa so that African prostitutes could get AIDS treatments?
• Would they donate it to Peruvian comic books to propagandize LGBT politics to Peruvian children?
• Would they give it to a luxury hotel in New York City to house illegal aliens with the nightly bed turndown service and the little mint on the pillow that they so rightly deserve?
• Would they donate it to a charity with several hundred million in the bank that pays their CEO $10 million a year so the charity could pay for oxygen for a 71-year-old with emphysema from smoking in Malaysia?

These are all real examples.  Nothing I made up.  This is where your tax dollars are going.

So, what would that family do?  Would it give it so they could see how monkeys act when they’re on cocaine?  Or would they use it for their own, selfish purposes, things like buying food for the family?

A guy I know quit coke.  He said it was the end of the line.

Well, they don’t get to decide, because unelected (and, to listen to the GloboLeftElite) entirely independent bureaucrats whose decisions are unreviewable by anyone get to decide how to spend that money.  Not the American public.  Not the State Department.  Not Donald Trump.

And certainly not you.

Back before Pa Wilder passed on, I’d go visit him when I could, and go to church with him.  On one Sunday we went to church, and the pastor prayed, “Oh, and I pray that the president and congress don’t pass welfare reform.  In the spirit of charity, those people need help.”

I’m sorry if you don’t like that meme.  Welfare jokes hardly ever work.

I got very, very angry.  I rarely get angry in church, except for those times I got burned with holy water, but that’s another story.  In this particular case, though, what made me mad was the idea that charity comes from the government.

No, charity doesn’t come from the government.  Charity is a conscious choice.  If the government gives someone money, it took it from someone else.  It wasn’t voluntarily given.  And if you think taxes are voluntary, I encourage you to stop paying them and send me the result of that experiment.

No, welfare from the United States government is a cruel parody of the idea of charity.  It is money taken by force from people who may not want to give it.  That’s bad enough, but it gets worse.  Since it’s given not by an individual or church but rather the government, the welfare is often resented by those that get it.

Yes.  Resented.  Because the act of welfare creates a system where the recipient is unconnected from the donor.  Not only that, it is money given without any obligation on the part of the person receiving it, so they experience no growth.  Additionally, there is no gateway to limit the recipient to people who are worthy.

I say it’s a parody of charity because real charity provides benefits to the giver as well as the receiver.  It is a virtue, but when force is applied it is stripped of meaning to both.

Would Ferrous Bueller’s Day Off be considered an Iron Man prequel?

This, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy of USAID.  It was taken over by GloboLeftElite bureaucrats.  The most charitable interpretation is that the agency was then taken over by people that Jerry Pournelle wrote about in his Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

“First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

“Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers (sic) union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

“The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”

But “iron woman” isn’t a superhero, it’s a command.

This is the very kindest way I could describe the situation.

In my opinion, the more likely reality of what happened at USAID is somewhat different.  I think that $50 billion in funds dispersed on bureaucratic whims attracted corruption, and that corruption spread until nearly the entire organization was corrupt, top to bottom and fully in the hands of the GloboLeftElite to spend on themselves and to spend to increase their power.

But I’m betting they’d say my viewpoint is less than charitable.