Digital Photography Nostalgia – Sony Mavica FD-91 Photos

What is this about digital photography nostalgia. Are we not supposed to be nostalgic about film photography rather than digital photography. But early digital cameras were not the market dominaters today’s are. Indeed at that time there was debate over whether they would ever produce images of sufficient quality to replace film for professional use. Now of course it’s only hobbyists and fine art photographers that use film cameras.

I got my first digital camera in 1999, and I went for the big zoom. The Sony Mavica FD-91 was one impressive looking camera for it's time. The 14X zoom on the Mavica was huge, a 35 MM equivalent of 37-518 MM and with Sony's Steady Shot image stabilization system it could be hand held at the full zoom. The camera was unique in that it used 3.5 inch floppy disks for image storage and though it was under a megapixel (1024X768 pixels) it produced decent 8X10 prints, even though the experts claimed that was not possible. It was a large camera but I was used to the size and feel of an SLR and preferred it over smaller digital cameras.

It really was a fun camera to use, even if I had to carry a box of floppy discs with me and change them after every 10 shots, and the telephoto was great with a zoom over double my 200 MM Konica zoom lens. And it was a lot lighter than my Konica and its bag full of interchangeable lenses. Of course the quality of images was nowhere near that of my Konica SLR or my current Panasonic FZ300, but it was good enough for me as an amateur.

Here indeed are some examples of what the camera could do, a slideshow of Mavica photos chosen and edited for my Desktop PC wallpaper that I change weekly.

 

Thoughts on American Politics

First of all what is a non-American doing commenting on American politics in the middle of an American election. Do I hear people screaming foreign interference. Well so be it. As long as the United States is the world’s most militarily powerful nation and not reluctant to use that power overseas if it believes it’s interests are at stake, and as long as it calls itself the leader of the free world, the rest of the world, particularly it’s northern neighbour, has a legitimate interest and stake in it’s politics.

Elections are usually about political parties and candidates vying for power. This one is different, even with the most recent announcement. This election is more about what type of country America is or wants to be. Does it want to continue as a Democracy (albeit it a Neo-liberal one), no matter which party is in power, or does it want to go full on Fascist led by Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists.

How dangerous is this. When one of the candidates for President is spouting rhetoric that sounds like it was taken straight out of Mein Kampf we have to be concerned.

“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,”

Adolf Hitler- Mein Kampf

“That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

“illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

Donald Trump – 2024 campaign

Source: NBC News

 

 

They tell us who they are and the people controlling and promoting Trump chose someone who expresses clearly the type of America they want. Trump may have created MAGA but it has been taken over by people much smarter, more sinister and dangerous than him. One of America’s major parties is now clearly under their control no matter what happens to Trump.

And who benefits from this most – the wealthy corporations and billionaire class who benefit from the current mainstream Neo-liberalism of American politics. They have created a situation where they have moved the perceived political centre artificially right so moderate centrists appear as radical leftists and Fascism appears as mainstream. The political struggle is no longer about the left fighting for a better society but instead fighting against moving backwards, and further to the right than America has ever been. And the left is being told if they want to save their country they have to fight to preserve the Neo-liberal status quo.

The corporate billionaire class is sitting pretty. If they win they get a Fascist regime that will fulfill their wildest dreams. If they lose they still win and get to keep the Neo-liberal status quo that has created historical levels of inequality and given them excessive wealth, as hopes for real progressive change is put on the back burner.

What remains to be seen is what the Democratic Party will do with the opportunity that is presented to them. Will they take the path of least resistance and defend the status quo or fight for real change and social democracy.

What America really needs, if there is hope for any real political change and social progress, is major changes to their political system starting with the end of the two party system. This would require some form of proportional representation to ensure all political viewpoints are represented in the nations legislatures proportional to their support among the population. It would require single person positions like the President and Governors be elected by some form of ranked ballot system so voters are not duped into believing they only have two choices. And it should require positions such as judges and prosecutors, which should be non-political, be taken out of the partisan political arena and made career public service positions.

In November we will see what America gets, at least in the short term. Only one result will provide hope, even if it is just hope for future change.

For a more comprehensive analysis of American politics see Is American Democracy Fucked.

What If The Next President Of The United States Is Not Mentally Competent For Office ?

My surprising take on that is that it won’t make much difference.

Many experts are already suggesting Trump is verging on dementia and his rambling nonsense seems to confirm that. However, who really believes Trump is in charge here. Call them the Alt-right, White supremacists, Christo-fascists, or whatever, they have done an excellent job of convincing Trump that they are following him while conning him into following them. Not only have they drafted his program for him but they have drawn up the list of who will run his administration. Trump is just a figurehead and showman that does an excellent job of pretending to be in charge. His mental competence is irrelevant, The only hope for America under Trump is that the deep state non-political apparatus has enough loyalty to the constitution to protect the people from the worst excesses of his handlers.

Biden, on the other hand, is slightly older and sometimes has communication issues but otherwise is an intelligent thoughtful leader. He will surround himself with like minded intelligent old school Democrats that will run his administration. Even if he turns out not to be mentally competent his administration will be an old school centrist Democratic administration, not great but not disastrous. The best chance for progressive change under Biden is if the Vice President was to, for whatever reason, take over.

Canadian Diversity and Right Wing Hate of Justin Trudeau

Yes, Justin Trudeau is a mediocre Prime Minister, but that is not why the right hates him. Nor is it because of carbon taxes or provincial vaccine mandates or lockdowns. It is because of perhaps the one thing he has excelled at and that is promoting Canadian diversity.

There are those that claim that Canada has no culture and others that claim that Canadian culture is a white European culture and anyone who was here before or came after the colonizers needs to adapt to that culture. But the truth is Canadian culture is a culture of diversity starting before anyone lived on this land and enhanced by everyone who came after.

Canadian diversity starts with it’s geography. We are a geographically diverse country (from sea to sea to sea to American border) and that is reflected in the diversity of our first peoples, from the peoples of the north, to the coastal peoples, the peoples of the prairies and the boreal forest and so on. All of these peoples had their own social systems and systems of government, including legal systems based on healing and restorative justice that were, and still are, centuries ahead of the European colonizers.

Then came the colonizers and immigrants who added to the diversity of the country adding traditions, languages and religions from all over the world. But it is not only ethnic and religious diversity that make us the country we are. We also have a diversity of physical and mental abilities, including neurodivergent people, as well as peoples of different sexual orientations and gender identity, first recognized by Canada’s first people through the concept of two spirit people.

The Prime Minister has recognized that our diversity is our strength and that is one of the main reasons he has become the target of the hate of right wing extremists and white supremacists.

Postscript.

None of this is to deny Canada’s historical mistreatment of our indigenous peoples or it’s discriminatory treatment of newcomers or other vulnerable peoples. That is a whole treatise on it’s own. This is meant to be focused on Canadian ideals and how we move forward in the future.

The Scourge of the Internet

No I am not writing about the fear and hate mongering taking over the Internet although they are the greatest evils of the Internet. And I am not taking about corporate social media with all it’s evils of turning the customer into the product, at least it can facilitate communication and community and even activism. I am talking about something much subtler and seemingly innocuous.

The Scourge of the Internet are so-called influencers and content creators.

When I think of influencers, The Kardashians are the first thing that come to mind, people famous for being famous. Influencers online are about being famous, and being charismatic or outrageous seems to be the way to go. But influencers are not really out to influence anyone, they are just looking for followers that can be monetized.

As for content providers, the word content says it. They are not about providing real information or knowledge, it’s just about creating something to stick in-between the advertising. That is why when you go researching online you keep finding multiple websites with exactly the same information, word for word (usually stolen from Wikipedia), Content providers are just sticking content they steal in-between the advertising. Again all for hits and advertising revenue.

These things may seem innocuous but they clutter up the Internet with meaningless pap making finding real information increasing more difficult, if not close to impossible. And AI is just going to make everything worse as the LLMs behind it feed on this mountain of garbage for the ultimate GIGO effect.

Can we have our old Internet back please – a place for information, communication and community.

Annual Report on Kanata South Pathways Deterioration, Spring 2024

Another year has gone by and it is time to report again on the deterioration of the Bridlewood and Glen Cairn pathways in Kanata.

Bridlewood

Glen Cairn

Previous Reports

Spring 2023 Bridlewood & Glen Cairn

Spring 2022 Bridlewood

Spring 2022 Glen Cairn

Spring 2021 Bridlewood

Doug Ford: Should we be thankful for small mercies ?

So is there anything good to say about Doug Ford.

Well he is not Pierre Poilievre or Danielle Smith. At least Ford does not seek votes by appealing to people’s fears and hatred. He is more of an old fashioned corporations know best, privatization will solve all our problems, capitalist conservative.

He doesn’t attack people for who they are or go after women’s right to bodily autonomy.

Yes, he wants to give the province to his business cronies, destroy the environment and dismantle our public health care and education systems, but no one is perfect.

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Can Save Itself and the Planet

The fossil fuel industry seems to have a romantic fascination with “all the oil in the ground”, a fascination that shields it from financial reality.

There are two things absolutely true about the fossil fuel industry.

It has a finite end because there is a finite end to the oil and gas in the ground.

The second truth is that extracting the remaining oil and gas keeps becoming more environmentally harmful, but more importantly to the industry, more costly. Indeed we are probably already at the point where their investments would have a greater profit by diverting them from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

But their romantic fascination with “all the oil in the ground” keeps them from seeing this.

If they want to maximize their profit would it not make sense to ration production of the easiest and cheapest oil and gas over future years, while leaving the most expensive and most environmentally harmful resources in the ground. This way prices could be maximized due to reduced supply while the environmental impact per year is reduced as we transition to a fossil fuel free economy, which they can move their investments into.

Housing As A Right

Should housing be a right. That is the question. But the real question is what would that mean and how do we make it more than a token right but an actual effective right.

In North America we had this mythology that everyone could own their own home. That has never been true. The closest we have come is at the peak of unionization when unions brought much of the working class into the middle class. But then the capitalist owners of the means of production moved the means of production to low wage countries and left the auto industry as the remaining remnant of what was once an industrial economy. They then transformed the service industry to a piece-work model, much of it based on “apps” that pretended low wage workers were independent contractors not entitled to the protection of employment and labour laws. This returned us to a state where the dream of home ownership was limited to the wealthy and professional classes.

However this myth led governments to create tax advantages for home ownership that distorted the housing market leading it to be dominated by much larger than necessary energy wasting homes which contributed to the creation of urban sprawl.

So how do we create housing as a right for everyone.

If housing is actually to be a right then everyone one must have access to decent and properly maintained housing at an affordable cost. The private sector will not provide this.

North America needs to take a more European approach where public sector housing is not relegated to the poorest of the poor but is available to the general population. Funding needs to be provided to eliminate public housing waiting lists and provide necessary maintenance. Co-operative housing needs to be encouraged and facilitated with government assistance. Living in publicly provided housing has to be normalized rather than stigmatized.

Fortunately the solution to the funding problem is the same as the solution to all public expenditure programs. Society has the money, it is just improperly distributed through an economic and political system that has created excessive financial inequality. The answer lies in taxing corporations and the wealthy appropriately, especially the excessive wealthy.

The private sector can still play a role as long as they realize the slumlord model is no longer an option with affordable decent publicly provided housing available to everyone. And they must accept that with housing as a right no one can be evicted without somewhere else to go.

On Television Part 3 – Cutting The Cord, Where We Ended Up

The Fifth Column first talked about “cutting the cord” in June 2019 in my post On Television that looked at the history of television from broadcast TV and rabbit ears through Cable TV to streaming services delivered via wi-fi.

In July 2020 I posted On Television Part 2 – Cutting The Cord about our first experience “cutting the cord”.

Our original plan was simply to replace it with streaming services and some downloads but decided for one time costs only to also add an antenna based over-the-air (OTA) television service.

However after a year or two we decided that using the antenna and PVR was not worth the trouble and the small amount of broadcast TV we wanted had become available online either through the providers websites or via other means.

We have now settled on using our Roku and six streaming platforms as our primary television sources:

•  Netflix, which everyone is familiar with

•  Crave with HBO/Movies + Starz

• CBC Gem Premium (including CBC News Network and all local CBC channels live

• Britbox, which features programming from the BBC and ITV

• Acorn TV, which features programming from the UK and other commonwealth countries as well as some Nordic countries 

• MHZ Choice which features mostly subtitled programming from European and other countries, which will be merging in April with the Topic streaming service to add more programs, including many dubbed into English, 

The Roku also provides access to a number of free streaming or direct broadcast programming (including CBC, CTV and Global) usually with commercials, but not always, as well as YouTube.

We also have access to programming via the computer which we have connected directly to our TV via an HDMI cable (after issues with our Chromecast).

A number of TV websites, including CTV and Global, provide free access to programming (particularly during the first week after broadcast) and some foreign TV websites such as BBC and ITV are available with a VPN set for the country of origin.

When we got rid of Rogers Cable we had basic cable plus a number of theme packs, as well as Crave/HBO. That, along with Netflix, was a monthly cost just under $100. After all this time with our current TV options, which provide a wider variety of higher quality programming, we are still playing less than that.

The Election Issue That Dare Not Speak It's Name

What election am I referring to – whatever one is next in whatever jurisdiction you are in.

Yes I am talking about that which we dare not speak – the need to change our economic system before its ultimate collapse.

Karl Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism, and it was happening, only to be rescued by of all things socialism – the pooling of the masses resources to rescue their exploiters.

However unless we act to change the system we can only put off the ultimate demise of capitalism as we know it.

It is not so much private ownership or even profit that I am speaking of, although they contribute to the problem. I am speaking of something much more fundamental – the need to redefine what we consider to be a successful economy. The problem is we currently measure economic success as continuous and increasing unsustainable economic growth based on the continuous unsustainable exploitation of finite resources.

Capitalism also only values wage employment discounting all activities not done for a paid wage as economically meaningless, including the caring for children by parents and volunteer work or other unpaid creative work. How capitalism values work is also subjective and very fucked up, someone playing playing a game earning a million dollars a year contributes 10 time as much to the economy as someone earning 100 thousand dollars a year finding a cure for cancer. The actual value of work to society has no relation to the economic value capitalism gives it.

We also have to rethink our historic attitudes to what we call civilized and primitive. I was brought up within a society that taught that our industrialized societies built on dominating and exploiting nature were far superior to those “primitive” societies where people lived simpler lives in harmony with nature. Unfortunately our civilization is bringing our society and planet to the edge of collapse.

Capitalism has it’s religious tenets as well, the most revered being the belief (very much in a religious sense, being based on faith rather than evidence) that competition is superior to co-operation and promotes innovation.

The belief is if you have a problem and tell ten people to solve it, it will be solved faster if each person works separately inspired by the fact they will make a fortune if they succeed or become a bankrupt failure if they don't. Indeed under capitalist dogma money is the only possible motivator.

The rational understanding that ten smart people working together, and off of each others ideas, striving for the common good, will be more successful sooner than ten individuals working separately is simply capitalistic heresy. The idea that people might be motivated by something other than money is anathema to our greed based economic system.

According to theory competition is supposed to result in multiple campaniles competing for customers business resulting in the ones that provide the best value for money thriving. In reality we see that what happens is the most powerful (most ruthless) driving out the weakest in an increasing move to a more monopolistic economy, with a few dominant corporations that are deemed to big too fail and must be saved by the socialism of taxpayer funded corporate bailouts.

Whether it was the aim or expectations of it’s creators, the most important and evil result of capitalism has been the rapid increase of inequality to the point of immorality.

We have moved along way from the original promise of capitalism, if it ever existed, where entrepreneurs formed businesses to make products or supply services to customers at decent quality for a decent price paying workers an honest days pay for an honest days work, in return for a fair profit. Today’s corporations (with a few exception) are only in one business, maximizing shareholder profits.

And that is not serving the needs of society or the people.

The only real election issue (except perhaps where democracy itself is the election issue) should be what do we replace capitalism with.

What is Wrong With The Internet ?

Yes, I know we could write a book, but essentially what is wrong with the Internet is the way we use it.

The public changed has the way it uses the Internet to the benefit of a few monopoly tech companies and those that want to spread disinformation because laziness has caused them to succumb to the cult of convenience.

We will skip the very early days before the World Wide Web and corporations being allowed on to the Internet and jump to the Internet/Web being broadly adopted by the public and accessed via computers.

In those days websites operated by organizations, institutions, media, businesses and even individuals were how we accessed the web. Phone apps did not exist.

We used search engines (Alta Vista was my preference) to find websites that we trusted to proved us with information. And we judged that information by how much we trusted the sources, seeking medical information from places like Health Canada or the Mayo Clinic and our news from reputable news media that we trusted offline.

We also used the World Wide Web for creating communities via online forums for specific subject interests like photography or mountain biking. All without being beholden to one predatory corporation for everything we did online.

We did not simply type a question into Google and believe the first response it provided without even paying attention to the source as many do today, and was the start of the decline of the reliability of the Internet (due to our choices). And this was before Google started selling search rankings and site operators started using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to artificially raise their rankings.

Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there.

The next thing that went wrong was users abandoning the Open Internet for the convenience of one proprietary source designed to sell advertising and drive traffic to that advertising. That, of course, was/is Facebook and it only became worse when it became a phone app and now a huge percentage of users never use the Open Internet at all and just use Facebook because it is so easy and all that they need and it is so easy and they do not care about all the well documented problems with and evils of Facebook because it is so easy. The cult of convenience trumps everything. And of course people believe Facebook is free.

This is not to say there are not a lot of good things like community resources and voluntary organizations available through Facebook. The thing is before Facebook all these resources were available on the Open Web. Unfortunately those of us who will not engage with the evil that is Facebook no longer have access to many of these resources that are now only available on Facebook because so many have decided that Facebook is absolutely necessary and irreplaceable. For many Facebook and other related phone “apps” have replaced the Open Internet.

I was going to link to articles on the evils of Facebook and how it is not free but that information is readily available and being added to regularly so we will let people use the Open Internet to do their own research, preferably not via Google. We suggest DuckDuckGo.

If only Facebook was the greatest evil online.

I once had the naive view that the Internet would be an effective tool against the promotion of hate and bigotry. In the “old days” the racists and bigots used to recruit directly from disaffected groups, youths with no hope for the future, recently laid off workers, etc., by befriending them and providing them a community where they would teach them their hate and bigotry. These were closed communities that sheltered members from other points of view.

When recruiting moved online I thought that the easy access to the truth would be an effective counterbalance.

Unfortunately they have created their own closed communities online in dark places like Eight Chan and Q’Anon fuelled by disinformation sites like InfoWars and Rebel News and now BrandX, formerly Twitter, along with certain places on YouTube.

Their followers shy away from the mainstream media, they shy away from science, they shy away from any authoritative information sources. These are people who believe stories like PizzaGate.

I just wrote “perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users not paying attention to the actual source of the information they find there”. But that may not be true. Perhaps the biggest thing wrong with the Internet is users limiting their use of the Internet, with its broad access to knowledge, to just sources that reflect back to them their own world view, a world view often based on wilful ignorance and disinformation and actual real fake news.

I have not yet touched on what the cult of convenience has done to online shopping. My first experience with online shopping was using the Internet to check product features and specifications on manufacturer’s websites while purchasing locally. I moved on to the convenience of purchasing online with free shipping, but for the most part sticking to stores with local retail outlets.

However, for many, the inconvenience of shopping around has become too much work and they have decided buying everything from one predatory monopolistic outlet is best for them. The cult of convenience wins again.

However I find Amazon’s business model to be as abhorrent as Facebook’s and I will never buy anything from them unless I absolutely need it and I absolutely cannot get it anyplace else.

There are wonderful information sources on the Open Internet and every day I learn of something new that I don’t always have enough time to check out. It is sad so many people want to hide away in dark places avoiding the light the Internet can bring to them.

Is There a Conspiracy to Break and Then Fix Health Care ?

So how would this work. I suggest first you underfund public health care as well as simply not spending budgeted funds. As the public facilities fail to meet the needs you claim private facilities are needed. You then transfer funds from public to private facilities further reducing the public facilities capability. You then claim the private facilities are the answer to the crisis and start increasing funding diverting more to the private sector. As care improves you declare that privatization has solved the crisis and is the saviour of health care. You then claim to be spending more on health care than ever as the added profit expenditures make it appear that more funds are being spent on care.

The winners are the private heath care corporations and the political parties they support that made this all possible and we get a bunch of new multi-billionaires as a bonus.

AI Has Nothing To Do With Intelligence

AI has nothing to do with intelligence but people believe the marketing hype, mostly because we have a distorted idea of what intelligence is, largely due to the media.

Take the quiz show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader” that says in its name that it’s about whether contestants are as intelligent as a fifth grade student. What the show actually tests is who is more familiar with the grade five curriculum, grade five students or people who have not been in school for twenty tears or more. I know who I am betting on.

And take the famously super intelligent Jeopardy champions. Maybe some of these people are highly intelligent but that is not why they are Jeopardy champions because Jeopardy is not about intelligence. It is about knowing stuff, particularly the type of stuff Jeopardy asks questions about. At best it is about knowledge, not intelligence.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines intelligence as: “the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason”. (Source)

I would refine that to: “the ability to understand and analyze information in order to make rational decisions based on that information”.

Intelligence is not about information it is about reasoning.

I remember what some might call the first forerunner to Alexa and other chat bots. It was called Eliza

ELIZA's creator, Weizenbaum, intended the program as a method to explore communication between humans and machines. He was surprised and shocked that individuals, including Weizenbaum's secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.[3] Many academics believed that the program would be able to positively influence the lives of many people, particularly those with psychological issues, and that it could aid doctors working on such patients' treatment.[3][13] While ELIZA was capable of engaging in discourse, it could not converse with true understanding.[14] However, many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite Weizenbaum's insistence to the contrary.[6] (Source)

This was not artificial intelligence and neither are the latest claimants, the large language models (LLMs).

A large language model (LLM) is a language model notable for its ability to achieve general-purpose language understanding and generation. LLMs acquire these abilities by learning statistical relationships from text documents during a computationally intensive self-supervised and semi-supervised training process.[1] LLMs are artificial neural networks following a transformer architecture.[2]

As autoregressive language models, they work by taking an input text and repeatedly predicting the next token or word.[3] Up to 2020, fine tuning was the only way a model could be adapted to be able to accomplish specific tasks. Larger sized models, such as GPT-3, however, can be prompt-engineered to achieve similar results.[4] They are thought to acquire knowledge about syntax, semantics and "ontology" inherent in human language corpora, but also inaccuracies and biases present in the corpora.[5]

Notable examples include OpenAI's GPT models (e.g., GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, used in ChatGPT), Google's PaLM (used in Bard), and Meta's LLaMA, as well as BLOOM, Ernie 3.0 Titan, and Anthropic's Claude 2. (Source)

Using statistics to mimic what a human might say or write is not reasoning and it is certainly not intelligence.

It might not be so bad if these systems did not claim to intelligent but only claimed to be able to retrieve accurate information and did that well but they are designed to NOT do that.

I remember the early Internet and search engines with advanced boolean search capability like Alta Vista and the early versions of Google before they sold their top search results to the highest bidder.

Then the Internet was mainly academic institutions and community based organizations. The information on the Internet was relatively reliable most of the time. That information is still there if you pay attention to the actual source.

LLMs could use an information base based on actual reliable sources like Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia, or the collections of actual scientific journals or other respected sources.

But instead they have adopted the bigger/more is better approach feeding as much of the Internet as possible into their models, often without permission of the sources/creators. This leads to an information base dominated by misinformation and disinformation leading to results like “there is no water in the Atlantic Ocean”. But obvious errors are not the danger here but the amplification of misinformation and disinformation in the political sphere.

But it is worse. These disinformation models are proving to be even more wasteful of energy and harmful to the planet than the cryptocurrency scam and their believers/followers just as faithful and misguided. And for what. Obviously they hope to make a shitload of money from this scam.

AI is clearly not intelligent, just dangerous.