Day: August 14, 2025

Is There A Post-Smartphone World?

This post is for all my techno geeks…..

I recall many years ago I got my first cel from a group called Digiph and then I moved later to a flip phone and then seeing the benefits of a smartphone made the transition….in those early days I did not foresee the part that these devices would play in our daily lives.

Now that smartphones have become indispensable what will be the next step in this evolution?

Artificial intelligence is advancing so quickly that some Silicon Valley bigwigs are betting it will lead to what might seem unthinkable at the moment: a world in which people don’t carry around smartphones. Instead, they might get their AI-powered know-how from their glasses, or maybe a bracelet. As Tim Higgins writes in the Wall Street Journal, one of the bigger advocates of this revolution is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who last week “put a bull’s-eye on the iPhone’s role as gatekeeper to the digital world.” Zuckerberg issued what Higgins calls a “manifesto,” which you can read in full via Silicon Valley Daily. He’s pushing the term “personal superintelligence” to describe things.

  • “Personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands our goals, and can help us achieve them will be by far the most useful,” he writes. “Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices.”

And, yes, Zuckerberg has been wrong before—just witness the “Metaverse.” But Higgins points out he’s not alone here: Amazon just bought the startup Bee, which offers an AI bracelet, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman is teaming up with legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive on some type of physical device to come. Meanwhile, Apple “is seen as a surprising laggard” in the field. Read the full analysis.

Will these wearables become as necessary as the smartphone of today?

Is this our future?

Any thoughts?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

The ‘Bum Blockade’

After Little Donny made his speech about the homeless in DC and ordered the Nat Guard, FBI and who knows who else into DC to curb crime and round-up the homeless….all that silliness made me think back into American history, the Depression to be exact and the policy in and around LA.

The year is 1936….

Beginning on February 3, 1936, the LAPD sent 136 officers to patrol 16 points along California’s 700-mile border with Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. “Veritable Army Corps Formed,” read the February 4 front page of the Los Angeles Times. Working with railroad executives and county sheriffs, these officers stopped trains, vehicles and hitchhikers, turning away those they deemed suspicious. Though Davis claimed the blockade refused entry to around 11,000 people by March 31, historians have since cast doubt on this figure, suggesting the actual total was much lower.

The patrol’s criteria for determining whether someone “belonged in California” was vague and largely up to individual officers’ discretion, writes Lascher in The Golden Fortress. He explains:

Most detainees exhibited some subjective characteristics of poverty, such as piles of weather-beaten luggage teetering atop a rickety jalopy or bindles sagging behind weary men hiking into the state. … Officers tended to wave shiny new Packards through their checkpoints but halted sputtering early-model Fords pulling makeshift trailers and caked with half a continent’s dust.

During the initial stop, officers fingerprinted the potential detainees to check if they had criminal records. Some who didn’t have warrants out for their arrest received the option of turning around and leaving California. Others were sent to “jails that might be little more than makeshift cells in rooms rented at off-season hotels in communities near the checkpoints,” according to Lascher’s book. Before long, the stream of migrants flooding into California had slowed significantly.

“The ‘California, Here I Come’ marching song of penniless wanderers faded away to a faint whisper in Arizona today,” United Press observed on February 6. The previous night, the news agency reported, officers stopped three trains in Yuma, Arizona, detaining 14 “transients.” That same evening, just 20 or so people lingered at a hobo “jungle” in Phoenix that usually hosted nearly 100 overnight guests.

As the Bum Blockade policed California’s border, Davis simultaneously continued to enforce harsh vagrancy laws in Los Angeles itself, searching for “indigents who can be prosecuted as vagabonds,” according to the Los Angeles Times.On February 8, the LAPD arrested 122 people deemed to fit these parameters, many of whom Davis claimed had criminal records.

https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/los-angeles-1936-bum-blockade-targeted-american-migrants-fleeing-hardship-during-the-depression

To learn more about this policy

View at Medium.com

Profiling has been with our law enforcement for a very long time.

Just a little something to think about.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

China In The Crosshairs

Donny has been rabid about the tariffs and sanctions he has placed on China some go as high as 125%…..and then out of the blue a pause to give China time to do whatever it is they think it will do.

Is this competition with China a winning strategy or is it just BS from a cluttered mind?

China’s economy is already one-third larger than the U.S. economy and growing far more rapidly. This was true before Donald Trump took office, but the growth gap has been even larger in the first six months of this year.

China’s economy has been growing at more than a 5.0 percent annual rate. Meanwhile the US economy grew at just a 1.2 percent annual rate. Put in dollar terms, China’s economy has grown by roughly $1 trillion in the last six months, while the US economy has grown by just $180 billion.

This comparison doesn’t really mean much to any of us in our daily lives. People care about whether they have jobs, rising wages, and living standards. Things don’t look great on the wages and living standards front either, but I’ll leave that one for now.

The point here is that if we envision ourselves in a Cold War competition with China, we’re losing badly. I know that China’s growth statistics must always be viewed with skepticism (that may be true here soon as well), but there is little doubt that over long period of times they are pretty much on the mark.

Over the last half century China has gone from Sub-Saharan Africa living standards to upper middle-income living standards. This means that even if the 5.0 percent growth reported for the first half of the year may not be exactly right, it is likely in the ballpark.

So, we shouldn’t be like Donald Trump and say we can ignore the numbers. We are behind China and falling further behind. Those are the facts that the New Cold Warriors need to recognize.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/11/in-trumps-competition-with-china-china-is-winning/

Will all these half-ass policies actually make China greater?  After all we are having a mini Cold War with China in and around the South China Sea……

Two certainties have emerged after seven months of Donald Trump’s control of America’s national security policy. First of all, there is no comprehensive national security policy and no likely candidate in the administration for formulating and managing a comprehensive policy. Second, the greatest challenge in the national security arena is China—the most important bilateral policy in the entire global arena—and the Trump administration is doing everything it can—whether intentional or not—to make China great and to worsen America’s standing vis-a-vis China. The dumbing down of the United States continues under Trump, and China’s standing in the global community is becoming stronger.

Over the past 75 years, China has rarely relied on the use of military power—in Korea in the 1950s to stop the advance of U.S. forces, and in 1979 to “teach the Vietnamese a lesson,” which didn’t go well for Chinese forces. Conversely, the United States has relied on the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to pursue wars that were neither winnable nor affordable (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq), and to use covert action unsuccessfully in overthrowing democratic governments in Iran, Guatemala, the Congo, and Chile.

U.S. military engagements that were designed to last weeks and months turned into decades of military engagement and occupation. Nearly every administration claimed it was not engaged in nation-building, but hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted in doing exactly that—nation-building. And, of course, the ridiculous absurdity of the Iraq War that was going to introduce democracy as a model for the entire Arab world. No strategic purpose was served by any of these interventions. And apparently no lessons were learned.

Meanwhile, China has transitioned from one of the poorest nations in the world to the second-largest economy with nuclear-armed forces growing at a record pace. Over the past 40 years, China has had the world’s fastest-growing economy with annual growth rates that often exceeded 10% a year. China’s economy grew over five percent in the first half of this year; the U.S. economy expanded by one percent. Meanwhile, U.S. tariff policy is losing friends around the world.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/trumps-policies-will-make-china-great-again/

The only people that are suffering the consequences of this competition are the consumers…..when will that be accounted for?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”