On March 8, 2018, McCulley Marine Services bought 59,973 pounds of steel in various sizes and shapes to repair and maintain one of our barges. The total paid for this steel was $40,710. On March 23, 2018, the Trump Administration’s tariffs on imported steel took effect. These tariffs imposed a 25% duty on steel imports …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Misdiagnosing a Carbon Monoxide Leak
Some context might be needed here: For the last 32 months I have been running a tugboat company. I intend to write more about that at some point. We operate a fleet of four tugboats and associated barges, smaller boats, and other equipment. Our tugboats are equipped with, among other safety equipment, carbon monoxide (CO) …
ChatGPT playing Wordle
It just occurred to me to wonder if ChatGPT (GPT-4) might be any good at Wordle. I constructed a prompt and had it choose my moves. I considered the possibility that others had already tried this and deliberately avoided googling for such experiments before doing my own so that my approach would not be tainted. …
Demographic Impacts
A lot of the discussion about COVID’s impact on the labor market (“Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle”) misses the longer demographic trend. The growth rate of the U.S. population is the lowest it has been in over 120 years. We have been losing workforce for years relative to the total population due to increasing average …
Mission Critical Coffee Pot
Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows …
Ours Has AI!
A lot of technology products claim to use “blockchain” and “AI”. This is generally bullshit but they are expected to use these terms like adjectives on ketchup bottles (“23% spicier! With AI!”) to keep up with their competitors. I was recently pitched a startup that claimed to be using AI in a market that is …
Artificial Intelligence is a dumb term
The recent boom in machine learning has led to a lot of misuse of the term “artificial intelligence“. This term was invented in 1955 when computer scientists were first starting to grapple with machine representations of human cognition. For decades, it meant trying to understand and render into algorithms what only humans could do. This …
Things I Learned in Elementary School
I attended a private Seventh-day Adventist Elementary School for 3rd-6th grade (1980-1984). I learned many things there. This is an incomplete list: Attending church on Sunday instead of Saturday, the true and proper Sabbath, is akin to deliberately celebrating someone’s birthday on the wrong day. Those who do so will likely not go to Heaven. …
Funding Public Education in Florida
This was the final week of the annual school supply drive, Tools 4 Seminole Schools, in which my Rotary club participates. Being involved in the effort gave me another opportunity to think about how public school funding works in Florida. As I understand it, Florida funds public schools through a mix of money allocated by …
Printing as PDF to the Mac clipboard
If you use macOS, I have a little script that you might find useful. I use this at least a couple times every workday. The Mac has great PDF workflow functionality. I will often be editing a document and want to send it out via email (or chat) to others who just need to review …