Elf Sternberg

I wanted to love Pragmata. Sadly, I only like it, but I will probably not love it. I’m about a third of the way through it and, while I’ll finish it, I feel confident in saying that this isn’t a game that will deserve a replay.

It’s not a spoiler to say give you the premise: Hugh is a member of a four-man team sent to a Lunar base to investigate a communications outage. The other members of Hugh’s team are killed in short order, and Hugh only survives due to a chance encounter with Diana: a robot in the body of a seven year old girl, and programmed with a persona to match. Together, you have to figure out why the base’s central computer is trying to kill you, shut it all down, and get the hell out of there. Typical video game stuff.

I’m just going to mention here that the online prudes concerned that your role here is as a grown man hanging out with a seven year old girl will give you salacious thought about seven year-olds are just being idiotic; that thought is entirely in their head. I read someone describing the game as “Dad Space,” and that was actually why I wanted to play it; I play video games where I get to hang out with cool characters, and Hugh and Diana seemed interesting.

They are, but only in a purely video game way.

Look, it’s a Capcom game. It’s not interested in a deep and interesting backstory. It wants to get on with the shooty-shooting, and if there’s anything more to the story than that it’s there to keep you from getting bored.

And that’s the problem: the writing, frankly, sucks.

Early in the story, Hugh asks Diana what she is. Diana says, “I am Pragmata D-I-313837, and I cannot be controlled by the central AI.” And that’s that. It’s delivered in a way that says “this is a fact. We won’t do anything interesting with her robot nature. She’s just your sidekick.”

Imagine how much more interesting the game would be if she said, “I am Pragmata D-I-313837, medical support robot for Doctor Somethingorother.”

“Why are shaped like a kid?”

“I dunno.”

“Can the central AI control you?”

“I don’t think so.”

See how easy it is to ratchet up the tension by introducing a little bit of mystery backstory and giving you to wonder if maybe the murderous AI is watching you through her? But no, it’s a Capcom game, it’s all about shooting robots.

The biggest problem, though, is that there are two Hughs in this story: the Hugh that wants to go home, and the Hugh of the Shelter. Actually, the Shelter is a huge problem in the story: it’s a respite, where Hugh can go pretty much all the time, get a full heal and a full refill of his kit, add on extra guns and ammo, and take a breather before heading out. And every time he heads out, he carries Diana on his back.

In the Shelter, Hugh is in Dad mode. He plays hide-and-seek with Diana. They dialog about his family, and his friends, and what it’s like on Earth. a She has the personality of a cheerful seven year old, full of questions, and their conversation has all the platitudes of a Sesame Street skit. Hugh sometimes finds childrens’ toys on his forays into the AI-controlled parts of the base and gives them to her, and she plays with the beachball and slides down the slide and draws with the crayons he knits out of the game’s Macguffin, “lunafilament.”

Walking through the power plant, or trudging through tunnels to the communications tower, Hugh is in Engineer mode. To this Hugh, Diana isn’t a little girl at all; she’s a useful tool who can sometimes trick combative robots into lowering their defenses, ping their surroundings for the next plot token, or unlock many of the doors. This Hugh would throw Diana into a furnace if that’s what it took for him to get home; to this Hugh, Diana is a machine that he can use to get the job done.

The Shelter says to not take the game seriously: no matter where you are, as long as you’re not actually in combat, you can find an easy portal back to the Shelter, where the AI can’t see or find you. The two Hughs seem so diametrically opposed to one another that it’s hard to take them seriously, either. The only consistency in the whole game is Diana’s persona which, frankly, is so plainly spelled out that she’s not that interesting either.

I’ll finish the game, because it’s pretty and I kinda like Shelter Hugh and Diana. I just wish it had been written by someone who cared about the characters more than they did shooting robots.

WARNING: I cannot emphasize enough that here be spoilers. Maybe you want them. Maybe that’ll make the art and gameplay worthwhile.

There are stories that let us be heroes. Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, Half Life are all such stories. Prey was such a story until the epilogue, at which point the story changaed so much I swore to never play it again. (I did, but I skipped the epilogue). There are stories where our heroism is very much a choice (the first two Bioshock games, or Cyberpunk 2077), and there are stories where the point is to say that being the hero doesn’t always come with the ending you thought it did (Bioshock Infinite comes to mind).

I write science fiction. I’ve thought a lot about the Simulation Problem, the moral infrastructures of aliens and robots unlike ourselves and how those would interact with human consciousness and human frailty. I’ve cheered for Free Guy, a dumb (but fun!) movie that has as one of its central themes Wittgenstein’s maxim for believing if someone has a soul: if you can’t tell if someone has a soul, your only moral choice is to believe and act as if they do until proven otherwise.

Clair Obscur’s theme is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the hero, or not. It doesn’t matter if you have a soul, or not. Your very existence is worthless in the eyes of God.

You spend the first two-thirds of the game with Lune, Sciel, and Mielle, as well as the others. You learn their backstories, their sadness at being in so broken a world, their tragedies that led them to join the expedition, gamble their lives on potentially hopeless task, and against the slimmest of odds save their world. The game shows you in slow, beautiful steps how their suffering, their love, their loneliness, and the companionship they’ve found in this adventure make them human.

At the end of Act II, you learn your friends are “not real.”

The prologue introduces the Paintress, a monstrous, bony figure on the horizon who is inflicting all the pain and suffering the citizens of Lumiere face. In Act I you meet “the man with the white beard,” who slaughters almost all of the expedition, leaving only a handful alive, the core of your party. Act II brings gives them names: the Paintress is named Ailene, and the man with the white beard is her husband, Renoir.

Ailene and Renoir are gods. In their world (of which you see barely two minutes in the entire game), there is a war between The Painters and The Writers. Nobody says why; I dug up every piece of lore I could and couldn’t figure it out. Both of these groups have the magical power to create new worlds by painting (“Canvases”) or writing them. An incident killed one Ailene and Renoir’s son, and left one of their two daughters, Mielle, hideously scarred and crippled by burns. Ailene took one of her dead son’s paintings, added a ton of detail to it, and gave him a city, Lumiere, in which they could live together.

Renoir had once been trapped in a painting decades ago, and Ailene saved him. Renoir and Ailene know that entering a painting eventually drives you mad, but Ailene would rather have had a lifetime with her son and go mad. Renoir entered the painting to drag Ailene back to the “real world,” but Ailene fought back; Mielle followed him to help her mother. The resulting battle caused The Fracture and caused Mielle to lose her memories, so she thought she was just another citizen of Lumiere, and Gustave adopted her and taught her how to live in the Fractured world.

That’s the overarching Lore. You just spent more time reading about it than the game itself spends showing it to you in dialog and flashbacks.

At the end of the game, Mielle has gathered enough Chroma (a form of magical power mostly used as currency in the game mechanic) and come into her own power enough that you, the player, are to make a choice for her: drive Renoir out of the Canvas, or let him burn it.

If you drive Renoir out of the Canvas, the people you’ve spent hours and hours with, the people the game told you to care about, get to live for as long as Mielle keeps her sanity. Eventually, though, she will die. Mielle wants this. She wants to live as an ordinary person, live out her days in a reconstructed Lumiere with the friends she’s come to trust and love, to see them happy, to see them live out the lives the narrative told us they deserved.

If you let Renoir destroy the Canvas, Mielle has a chance to live out a “real” life, in the real world, in a burned shell of a body, it’s skin barely able to move, blind in one eye, unable to speak. There’s a whole human mind back of that remaining eye, but her family treats her with contempt. Ailene’s attachment to her son will be broken and she’ll have a chance to be healed.

Your choice, then, is to take the risk that your life means something and deserves a chance, or to accept that it doesn’t mean anything at all and your death will give the gods (with whom you have almost no contact and who view your very existence as a problem) a chance at some closure.

Like, no. To hell with that sort of premise. It made me angry with an incandescent rage that all that time was buildup to “Oh, let’s give Renoir a chance at closure.” He murdered a city already. He’s been abusing his power to create and then neglect life for decades. He gets less than ten minutes of screen time and we’re supposed to accept that his feelings, his “life forces on us cruel choices” bullshit, matters more than our friends, our companions, and our lives? Just because he’s some arbitrary definition of “really real?”

Nope, not playing this game again.

Omaha and I had the privilege of attending Considering Matthew Shepard, an oratorio with an extensive chorale put on by blending three different choruses: the University of Washington Chamber Singers, the UW Chorale, and the Seattle University Choir.

It was… heart-wrenching. It doesn’t try to traumatize the audience with graphic descriptions of the murder, but it does make clear that the killers were brutal and unrelenting, that they upgraded from petty theft and robbery to full-blown murder because Shepard was gay. One of them even said as much.

The opening song, “An ordinary boy,” talks about who he was and includes photos of diary pages in which he lists all of the things he loves. Soloists portray his mother, father, and younger brother in an aria as they describe Matt Shepard as they knew him. The narrative continues with Shepard going to the LGBTQ meet-up on campus, then going to a bar and, eventually, being taken to a lonely road, beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence.

The fence, of all things, has its own voice as it describes the night as its passed, as Matt’s heart continued beating. Shepard was found 18 hours after his assault, still alive. His heart beat for another eight days, but he never woke up again.

There are three songs following this one: the angry, “What have you done?” (which includes mention of churches that protested at the funeral and displayed signs that proclaimed “Shepard Rests In Hell”); the sad “Prayer for peace” (in which the fence, again, signs about how people came to touch it, leave gifts there, and make of it a memorial), and “Just like you,” in which the choir talks about the two killers and how human they were. They weren’t monsters. It ends with that bittersweetness that’s endemic to all of queer life, queer joy intermingled with the sense that the battle with compulsory heterosexuality will be generations long.

I cried a lot. I lived through those days. I was going through my own coming out, repeatedly, as different parts of me tried to reconcile: kinky, queer, horny, married and also, suddenly, fatherhood. As I watched those sincere, earnest twenty-somethings on that stage, it hit me that they were just as moved by the moment as I was, and yet most of them had been born after Matthew Shepard’s murder, and after the huge battle, after the evangelical church was briefly shamed for being so ugly in face of a young man’s death.

And yet they cared. I wonder how passionate I was about that sort of thing when I was in my mid-20s; that would have been, oh, ’92 or ’93 or thereabouts, the height of the AIDS crisis. I went to quite a few protests in that era, got the t-shirts, did my activism as a Planned Parenthood safer sex outreach volunteer. I wish I had the naivete that went with such passion; these days, my activism is small, targeted, and mostly consists of calling my congressfolks and financially supporting the lesser of two evils.

If you have a chance, go see Considering Matthew Shepard. Just remember to bring tissues.

The 2025 off-year election happened about a month ago. Democrats won a number of highly important races in places like Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, plus a large number of down-ballot elections at the city and county level, with the most notable being that of Zohran Mamdani winning the moyorship of New York. A lot of punditry came out and shouted, “The Democrats are winning!”

We’re not winning. It’s just that the Republicans have finally angered enough of the electorate that they’re beginning to lose. There’s a difference, and we need to understand it. As a wise old woman once told me, “Voting isn’t really how things are run. The career bureaucrats run things, voting is a way to object, mostly. Someone always benefits or they won’t do the work keeping the thing running. The fight is usually over who controls the benefit.”

That’s what’s happening now. The people who elected Donald J. Trump and the rest of his (now literal) clown cars are upset that he isn’t delivering. As Paul Krugman put it on his blog the other day,

Trump ran a campaign about bring prices down, cutting the price of energy in half, making groceries much cheaper. He obviously hasn’t delivered and hasn’t even made an effort to deliver. I’m glad that people feel betrayed.

That’s what happened on November 4th. The electorate objected to being mislead. They objecteda to being lied to by this guy. They objected to being betrayed. Oh, yeah, you can find a lot of “people” on 𝕏itter (most of them Russian robots these days) pumping the MAGA rhetoric, and it can be frightening when we read that these machines are better than we are at picking the best way to change an individual’s polticial opinions. But even all that psychological warfare can’t win when so many basic things like meat, coffee, and medication have seemingly doubled in price over the past year.

Therein lies the problem. They’re not protesting the mistreatment of their latino. They’re not protesting the economic tornado that has devastated America’s Black communities. They’re not protesting the wave of anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-lesbian legislation, or the end of the postal service, or the termination of America’s prominence in science and medicine.

All of these will make it harder to live together as a nation in the future. The high prices, though, those are what make it harder to live at all in the present, and that’s what the electorate protested on November 4th.

The reason the Republicans are still winning is because they’re promising people they’ll do something. It may be objectional, you’ll hate some of it, but at least they’ll be doing something.

The Democrats routinely promise to do nothing. The grim joke with Democratic activist slogans is that, if by some miracle an election wave powerful enough to give them control of the goverment is allowed to ever happen, whoever they elect will issue a ton of pardons, a few congressional committee will issue reports about how bad it was but that nothing should be done because it would disrupt and damage “the comity of America” or whatever.

For example, Hakeem Jeffries, the current Democratic minority leader of the House of Representatives, floated the Democrat National Committee’s choice of slogan for 2026 as “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Let me propose a better slogan:

Arrest all them bastards.

With a few remarkable exceptions at the municipal level, nobody has said anything like that.

There is one (ONE!) politician right now who loves the same America I do. Who, every time he’s on camera, praises something great about it: the natural parks it preserves, the vibrant cities where so many people live together, the beautiful farms and countryside that feed us. Who loves the visions of the artists, the vibrancy of queer people, the excellence of Black and Muslim athletes and scholars.

That politician is America’s most noteworthy socialist.

When was the last time you heard a white Democrat Congressman praise someone who wasn’t white or male? I looked, and I can’t find a recent incident of someone else defending Ilhan Omar from the Republican’s constant barrage of abuse. I can’t find a recent report of someone else defending Sarah McBride, the only transwoman in the House of Representatives.

I don’t want to hear some half-hearted, mumbled concession that, “Yeah, they shouldn’t be mean to Mrs. Omar or Ms. McBride or Ms. Octavio-Cortez.” I don’t want them to look embarrassed or ashamed that hey have spend some effort defending a woman or a black person or a trans person or a latina. I want them to be proud of their colleagues, to say what admirable features, ideas, and perspectives those colleagues bring to the table.

I want to hear a white Democratic Congressman say, “Look, I don’t agree with representative Omar on everything— we’re Democrats, we’re allowed to think for ourselves— but these attacks on her patriotism, her citizenship, and her commitment to representing her District are un-American and must stop.”

I want to hear Democrats say that America is loud and proud in all its forms. That well-funded and well-run cities are necessary for the health of a powerful, dynamic country. That the very word “civilization” comes from a Latin term for “to live peacefully aside strangers.” That freedom isn’t made better when we take away students’ freedoms to be who they are inside, or citizen’s freedoms to travel without documents, or women’s freedom to live without having to marry.

Mamdani won on a simple idea: “New York City is a fantastic place to live. People are struggling, true, but history shows us a lot of successful ways to ease their burdens and make New York City an even better place to live.” It’s a progressive vision. It’s a postive vision.

Do that with the America, Democrats.

Embrace, admire, and defend the people whose life paths aren’t your own. Say how much you love America, even the conservative, rural parts of it. Say how great the country is, admit to its flaws, and say it could be even better.

And that you’ll arrest all them bastards.

It is mid-August, the very height of blackberry season in the Pacific Northwest, and with some rain earlier this week the blackberries in my neighborhood have plumped up and are undeniably delicious. All this week, I’ve seen kids and their parents at the communal blackberry bushes that grow along easements, drainage ditches, and jogging trails. There’s no organized effort; it’s just take what you can, and if you’re late to the party, tough luck.

I was picking blackberries and mentioned that to someone else who was there with two kids. “I think they call that the tragedy of the commons,” he said. I didn’t answer him, but it is not, it is absolutely not, because those blackberry plants, while they are communal, they are not a commons.

A commons has three important features. First, it is a local, naturally occurring feature of the environment. Second, the community is dependent upon that feature for their very survival. Third, there is a widespread communal understanding that the feature is fragile and can be exploited, cheated, or damaged, and there is an ongoing, vocal communal effort to ensure that nobody damages it or cheats others out of their share.

Himalayan blackberries may be local, and they may be a plant, but they’re an invasive species introduced about a century ago, not something the Pacific Northwest has had since time out of mind. Nobody in the Pacific Northwest is dependent upon them for food, and certainly not warmth, water, or shelter. The only communal decision being made about them is that they have to be torn out quickly and often whenever they’re a danger to local agriculture, infrastructure, or a child’s scratched arms. The route from my home to the local light rail into Seattle has a patch where the vines grow out over the bicycle path, and sometimes the bicyclists will do some guerrilla weeding to get rid of them.

“The Tragedy of the Commons” is a racist trope invented to sound scientific and to get into the peer-reviewed journals because the inventor of the trope, Garrett Hardin, wanted white people to embrace “a fundamental extension of morality.” That extension was not to bring more human beings into the fold of those who we must protect; it was to convince white people that white people had a superior moral claim to the future, and if there was an planetary disaster that limited the Earth’s capacity to keep all of humanity alive, white people must be prepared to kill everyone else.

There were no tragic commons. Commons, for centuries, allowed communities to subsist, to survive, often with a reasonable expectation of “enough” heat, food, water, and shelter, through careful communal management of local environmental features.

Commons don’t exist much anymore because they were inconvenient to kings and emperors; they made it hard to tax, because nobody knew how to value them. Wikipedia’s article about England’s Enclosure Laws describes some of the process by which “commons” were turned into “resources”; the latter could be described, accounted, owned, and taxed by the ever-reaching arm of monarchies and empires. But while they did exist, they were valuable, sustainable, well-managed, and treasured by the people who depended on them.

Seattle’s Himalayan blackberries definitely ain’t all that.

I’ve just done something… I’m not sure what to call it. Terrible? Wonderful? Should have happened months ago? I deleted a project on my hard drive, in fact the biggest project, all 415 gigabytes of it. My writing only amasses all of 25 megabytes, or about four million words, not counting any of the social networking I’ve wasted my time on over the past 36 years– and it has been 36 years, stretching all the way back to 1989 and my first encounter with Usenet in 1989.

The project’s name, which was so big, overwhelming, and so in need of isolation that it had its own username and local account, was stable.

It was just an experiment with stable diffusion. It grew into an obsession. I realized the other day that I was wasting hours on the damned thing, tweaking to find one more perfect image in a sea of six-fingered, three-armed men, women, furries, and monsters. I told myself that it was merely a recreation, a form of leisure. Over the course of
the past 2½ years I generated upwards of a million images, and still had about 100,000 of those on my hard drive, just taking up space. Not to mention the models themselves, some of them LORA files that simply cannot be found anywhere else for love or money, jealously hoarded by aficionados because they were created before April of 2024, when the big boys decided no more LORAs that allowed you to generate pictures with “absurdly large breasts” or “being caressed by lots of tentacles” when they also tried to sneak underage girls into the data stream, and which you could then generate if you knew the right keywords, the which were frequently embedded in the keyword_frequency key embedded in the metadata block.

All gone now. Poof. Even the backups have been destroyed. Going cold turkey on day one.

And when I say “wasting hours” I mean it truly; it was as bad as two or three hours every day. I had stopped reading. I had stopped coding for fun, although that may be more an artifact of how well my brain works after that nasty COVID bout and the ravages of turning, well, 59.

I never posted anything that I generated because I recognize the ethical problems in image generation “AIs.” It’s funny how many of the people deep into this, er, hobby, recognize that this isn’t AI at all and simply call them “diffusion models” of one sort or another. I don’t want to take money out of artists’ hands; I want more artists making more art, not less. The number of story ideas I extracted out of these, good grief, thousands of hours I soaked into that thing over the past 30 months I can number on one hand, because it’s literally 5. Out of the million images I generated, I kept five.

There are artists on Twitter who have given me more good story ideas in an hour than the estimated nine man-months of my life I put into what is probably the most useless skill I shall ever have acquired.

There’s no reason I couldn’t rebuild most of it; after all, it’s just downloading software, and this time I have more skill in handling LLMs in local space, since, again, I had no desire to share either my skills or my products with a commercial image producer.

I also deleted a lot of tools that I had developed along the way. I wrote my own little programming language: Loopy. The Loopy interpreter was written in Python and allowed me to do all sorts of peculiar tweaks to the prompts and the various strengths and timings of components of the prompt in mid-process, just so I could do odd and silly things with wildcards above and beyond what Stable Forge was capable of processing, and could do it hands-off, without the browser running. I could “do multiples runs of five of this prompt, using the same seed for each run, only using these six different LORAs in succession,” or “Do the multiple runs, use the same seed each time, but progressively increase the influence of the LORA,” so I could do some empirical analysis on just how much of one LORA or another I needed to get whatever the LORA promised to do to look “exactly right.” I could even go to one of several image galleries on-line, such as CivitAI’s “Furries” gallery, pick as many images as I liked from the gallery and open them in tabs, and the Loopy would download the generation data for each image and attempt to reproduce them locally, with whatever tweaks I wanted that day to make them more interesting to me.

And despite all of this, despite generating at least a million pictures, I found five I wanted to keep.

That’s an obsession. Despite my own observation that AI exploits a critical vulnerability in the human brain, I succumbed to it. I drowned in drab beauty, like a certain billionaire obsessed with making everything look like the inside of a 1950s “historical fantasy” titillation film, regional car dealership rococo slop. It’s ironic, I suppose, having seen what the Pixiv “artist” AIBot could do with it, and understanding exactly how habit-forming it could be, that I wanted to be able to do what AIBot did, and better. And, I suppose, I did to better; much better. Read thousands of prompts and you’ll develop the skill too, it just won’t be a very useful skill.

Anyway, all gone now. I hope. As I said, I could put it back, minus some “classic” LORAs for a variety of, well, mostly breast sizes (always a hard thing to get right with the early generation, and I never graduated beyond Stable Diffusion 1.5), but I deliberately made even that difficult: I deleted the Loopy toolkit repository. I don’t want that temptation.

I expect I’ll be grumpy about this for a week or so; a habit, even a bad habit, puts the victim through an extinction burst when your brain realizes that that particular source of dopamine is no longer operant. But I suspect I’ll also get over it; I wonder what I’ll do with all the extra time. I should plan on finding something better to do with all that brain power.

A headline this morning on NBC read, Arizona Moves to Ban AI Use in Reviewing Medical Claims. This law is profoundly idiotic, and one of the most important bits of idiocy is obvious right in the body of the law. The law is a PDF, so I’ll paste the whole thing here. It’s not long:

H.B. 2175

A. Artificial intelligence may not be used to deny a claim or a prior authorization for medical necessity, experimental status or any other reason that involves the use of medical judgment.

B. A health care provider shall individually review each claim or prior authorization that involves medical necessity, experimental status or that requires the use of medical judgment before a health care insurer may deny a claim or a prior authorization.

C. A health care provider that denies a claim or a prior authorization without an individual review of the claim or prior authorization commits an act of unprofessional conduct.

D. For the purposes of this section, “health care provider” means a person who is certified or licensed pursuant to title 32.

Notice in section D they define “health care provider.” They chose not to define “artificial intelligence.”

In insurance, an actuarial table is a database that takes in a collects a massive pile of data and creates a statistical relationship between your current health (and lifestyle) statistics and the likelihood of your death, future disability, or the likelihood of any given treatment having a benefit that justifies the cost.

Insurance companies will stop calling their AIs “AIs” and start calling them “Actuarial attention models,” since the “model” in “large language model” is just a massive pile of data about the statistical relationships between phrases to determine what phrase is likely to follow another in human speech. The “AI” models used by insurance companies use a similar algorithm (“these medical and lifestyle events in this order are likely to create this outcome…”) but respond with a spreadsheet, not a conversation.

This bill effectively bans actuarial tables, since both actuarial tables and machine learning models do the same thing: statistical analysis. LLMs are especially bad at it because they’re just probabilistic parrots without any actual human intent behind what they’re saying; all the intent went into choosing the training data, the outcome is still broadly incomprehensible to even the best computer scientists. But this is an illusion; behind the curtain, it’s just statistics about likely outcomes.

The problem here is not the use of statistics. The problem here is systems that require low-level workers to make judgments that “maximize shareholder value” at the expense of human lives, while at the same time shielding upper-level management from any criticism or penalty for expending human lives. “That’s just what the numbers say” is the whole of the reason, even if the one real number that matters to insurance executives is “If you save too many lives, my bonus goes down.”

Accountability drain, the ability to say “no one person is responsible for this outcome,” will persist until we as a civilization decide “for every decision, there must be someone who has the final say in what it is and how it can be changed, and that person is accountable for what follows.” Banning statistical analysis of any kind isn’t the change we need. It’s just window dressing over ongoing human misery.

The 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, nails this perfectly:

THE MAN: All I know is I got my orders. They told me to tell you you got to get off, and that’s what I’m telling you.

MULEY: You mean get off my own land?

THE MAN: Now don’t go blaming me. It ain’t my fault.

SON: Whose fault is it?

THE MAN: You know who owns the land — the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.

MULEY: Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Comp’ny?

THE MAN: It ain’t nobody. It’s a company.

SON: They got a pres’dent, ain’t they? They got somebody that knows what a shotgun’s for, ain’t they?

THE MAN: But it ain’t his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.

SON: All right. Where’s the bank?

THE MAN: Tulsa. But what’s the use of picking on him? He ain’t anything but the manager, and half crazy hisself, trying to keep up with his orders from the east!

MULEY: (bewildered) Then who do we shoot?

Arizona decided to shoot the computer, for all the good that’ll do.

About once a month we try to have my adult children come over and have dinner, to touch base, see if they’re doing well, and feed them. They both grew up on my cooking, and my son, at least, continues to cook whenever he has the time and energy, which isn’t as often as he’d like.

This time, I made the American classic Betty Crocker Ham & Scalloped Potatoes. If you read that recipe closely, though,
you’ll see that the total cook time is a mind-boggling 1 hour and 40 minutes, and that’s after you’ve spent 20 minutes putting everything together. It’s 2 hours ’til dinner is ready, although the cook only has to put in the 20 minutes at the beginning.

Thanks to a delay at the pharmacy and a traffic accident on the way home, I didn’t have two hours. But I do know how to cook. And thanks to Anthony Bourdain and Jacques Pepin, I had a few aces up my sleeve. I realized that the long cooking time was there to ensure the potatoes were cooked through and softened, and that I could shorten that process substantially by pre-cooking them until not quite soft enough for mashing, and while that was happening I could soften the onions for a much longer period in lower heat, caramelizing them for a deeper,
sweeter flavor.

Ingredients

• 1 medium onion, sliced thin


• 6 Yukon gold onions, sliced 1/4” thick


• 4 tablespoos butter, divided 3tbs / 1tbs


• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour


• 1 teaspoon salt


• 1/4 teaspoon pepper


• 2 cups milk


• 3/4 cup cheddar cheese


• 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese


• 1 1/2 cups cooked ham, cut into small cubes

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350°F


• Put a Dutch oven on the stove, on medium-low heat. Melt 3tbs butter in the pan, then the onion slices, stirring to coat completely with the butter.


• Put the potatoes into a pot, cover with cold water, and bring to a boil. Turn it down immediately to a simmer and set a timer for 12 minutes.


• Watch the onions, stirring occasionally. Do not let them burn!


• When the timer for the potatoes goes off, try to push a fork through a slice. It should go through with some resistance (they have to be firm enough to stand up to mixing), but not solid the way fresh potatoes will be. If they’re not ready, another three to five minutes
  should do it. When the potatoes are ready, drain completely and set aside to cool.


• Heat the milk in a microwave, about 3 minutes, but not to boil.


• Put the last tablespoon of butter into the onions and, when it melts completely, add the flour. Stir to coat completely, about a minute.


• Turn the heat up to medium and begin slowly adding the milk, stirring continually to mix it all together. You’re going for a white sauce with caramelized onions here! The gluten in the flour should thicken the milk as it heats up, and you want it consistent. When all the milk is added, take the Dutch over off the heat and stir in the cheddar cheese, then the salt and pepper, tasting it as you go.


• Begin adding the potato slices and the ham, a handful at time, stirring gently so as not to break too many of the slices (it’s okay if a few break) to coat everything with the onion sauce.


• Sprinkle the top with the Parmesan cheese, and bake for 20 minutes. If it’s not browned on top, turn on the broiler for a minute or two, but watch it closely!


• Serve hot.

It’s an extra ten to fifteen minutes of effort, and it’s a lot more hands-on doing even this minimal amount of caramelizing the onions, but dinner’s ready in 50 minutes instead of 2 hours and the flavor is a heck of a lot deeper and more satisfying.

Serve with a steamed or roasted green vegetable (broccoli, string beans, something like that) and a salad with a bright dressing.

The Kroger grocery chain recently held a shareholder teleconference where they discussed replacing all of the price badges on their shelves with digitial badges. The idea is that the stocker can just scan the product’s bar code and the digital badge will automagically update with the current price. Using e-paper, very low energy comm chips, and a sliver of solar strip along the top, the badges will be self-powering, self-maintaining, even self-identifying. IPV6 means there’s enough IP addresses for every badge in the store, they won’t be very busy most of the time so they won’t saturate the network, etc. etc. Technologically, the challenges of this plan are not that big. And this is not a terrible idea.

During the call, however, one of the presenters said that these badges also introduced the possibility of surge pricing, in the same way that Uber does surge pricing: when a product is scarce, they can instantly raise the price to reflect its scaricity, ensuring that only those who are willing to pay more for the product, those who truly demand the product, will pay for it.

If I was a shareholder in this deal, I’d be pulling out of Kroger the second they start rolling out their surge pricing idea.

My degree was in accounting, because in 1986 my parents thought “There’s no money in computers.” So I minored in CS. At the time I was doing so, formal “cybernetics” was a big part of the curriculum, thanks to Ronald Reagan. You see, the Soviets were still trying to cyrbernize their entire economy using computers, and for some reason the Americans became convinced that cybernetics was about computers.

It’s not. “Cybernetics” has become so corrupted as a word that a whole new discipline has been created to take its place: “Systems Thinking.” Either way, what they these terms mean has little to do with computers. Cybernetics is the study and modeling of a complex system, focusing on the flow of materials into the system over time and analyzing how those flows can be optimized to produce the best possible outcomes. The Soviets hoped to model the entire economy, every raw material and every factory and every individual need, to create a cornucopia machine. Needless to say, that was a bigger job than any computer they had could possibly have managed.

A forest is a system. The inflows are, well, water and sunlight and soil. The durable events over time are rain and sun and the seasons and the ocassional forest fire. A forest has evolved to grow at an optimal rate under its local conditions.

In the US Pacific Northwest, forestry is in a sustainable mode; the USDA (Department of Agriculture) and private forestry companies work together to harvest wood at a sustainable level. The forest recovers at a rate that is less than optimal (because humans are removing some of it), but which produces wood at a steady rate which USDA arborists regularly adjust, seeking an optimal rate. This works because the USDA owns a lot of the forest land in the Pacific Northwest.

In the US Atlantic Northeast, the story is very different, a cycle of boom and collapse. Most of the forests are privately owned. If a private forestry company does not harvest its forest to collapse, and another does, the one that does ends the cycle with more money than the one that still has a viable forest, and it ends the cycle with the power to buy out the poorer business. If they go bust, newcomers to the game with shiny MBAs leap in and hedge fund that sucker. But the forest is still there; ruined but arable. Replanting happens, and within 15 to 20 years the cycle begins again. It’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma: if anyone cheats, the system goes into overdrive and heads toward collapse again.

The Pacific Northwest arborists are always watching out for oscillations. Oscillation states are between “sustainable” and “headed for collapse”; take too much and the forest gets hurt, and recovers more slowly, and is unharvestable for a longer period. Collapse is considered different from oscillation because it’s both almost total and because recovery probably won’t happen within the timeframe of a business’s survival.

Grocery logistics is a similar system. There is still “time” in the Just-in-Time inventory and logistics systems of the 21st century. When a shortage occurs in a system, that’s an oscillation. Accounts who know their systems know that the way to figure out how to handle the shortage is to increase the amount of time inventory sits in a warehouse, maybe from one week to three, and then to start backing off until the rate of delivery from supplier to warehouse to retail outlet stabilizes. If you shorten the rate, try to push more inventory into the system in a short period of time to make up the shortage, you make the oscillations bigger as the system experiences a blockage of more product, less processors at the warehouses, and an inelastic amount of shelf space on which to sell it. You get these pulses of days when you have too much product, and days of not enough.


Surge pricing will damage the ability of acocuntants to determine that optimal rate. The market signal that something is wrong comes from a number of places, but one of them is a drop in the income from a given product. If you adjust the product price, you damage the system’s information flow. America throws away megatons of food every year; we overproduce by ridiculous amounts, and the same is true of many other necessary products: diapers, toothpaste, aspirin. A shortage in any of these is not a case of supply and demand; we are, as a civilization, oversupplied with all of them. It is a case of logistics failure.

Surge pricing is not an attempt to price something in short supply in order to meet consumer demand for a steady supply of a product. It is an attempt to paper over a logistics failure in order to meet shareholder demand for a steady supply of a profit.

Which brings us to the prisoner’s dilemma and the quarter-by-quarter punish-or-reward system of our current stock market. If Kroger tries this and shows even modest increases in profitability over two or three quaters, all of their competitors will follow suit. At which point, consumers will get deeply annoyed at unpredictable pricing with seemingly random changes day-by-day. Consumers will seek out alternative outlets and pull back on their interactions with big-chain grocery stores until the stores relent or collapse. Or Congress steps in and tells them to cut out the bullshit.

Surge pricing in a heavily oversupplied commodity market is a sign of MBA brain: logistics failures are an opportunity to reap profits, not fix the system. It will make the experience of buying groceries more anxious and miserable, so you know the psychopaths will love it.

Omaha and I took the electric vehicle camping in a national forest. Our assessment is that it’s very do-able and very serviceable if you’re willing to do a little planning ahead of time.

TL;DR: Range anxiety is real, but you can manage it with a little advanced planning, and it will get better over time. Your best average speed over the highway will be closer to 40 miles every hour because of charging times. Your car probably has two batteries, you’re screwed if either one dies, and there’s almost nothing in the car that tells you about the second. If you mainly use the car for city driving, you will be shocked by how much the wind resistance of highway speeds eats into your range.

Omaha and I wanted to go hiking in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest area around Mt. Adams in south Washington State. This was our first outing going camping since we’d bought the new Subaru Solterra so we decided to see if it would be a workable solution. We made some plans and did an assessment of every charger location we could possibly need along the route. There were plenty along the north-south corridor of I-5, so that wasn’t too worrisome, and our campsite was only about 15 miles from the Bonneville Hydroelectric Dam which had a charging station as well.

On Range Anxiety

EV range anxiety is real, but it’s not that different from having “ICE gasoline anxiety.” Nobody calls it that, and after you’ve been driving an ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) car for a year or more you kinda understand just how many miles you have left before you need a gas station. EVs are exactly the same, except for two things.

First, the range indicator isn’t a vague needle responding to a float sloshing about in a puddle of liquid explosive, it’s a number, a frighteningly exact number (except when it isn’t– see the section on highway driving) about how many miles are left before your battery dies. Watching that number count down in metronomic precision is like watching a countdown until your execution, or at least becoming stranded with no way to power back up quickly.

Secondly, the availability of chargers in more rural places is spotty at best, and because they’re not usually next to 24/7 facilities they’re often at risk of vandalism or theft, so it can be frustrating to find one only to find it broken. Society doesn’t protect them the way it does gasoline stations. The fact that one can be plunked down anywhere there’s electricity available, and that a (small) profit can be extracted from their being so, doesn’t mean that everyone is willing to do so, provide parking space for it, or put up with the hassles of copper thieves and anti-EV vandals.

The cure for range anxiety is the equally exact numbers that you can derive from any decent modern map program, such as Google Maps, for the distances between where you are and where you’re going. Figure a ten percent buffer on your total battery (i.e. if you have a 240-mile range, save 24 miles of reserve). Double the distance between the charger and your destination (because you have to get there, and get back), add that to the reserve, and keep the range number above that, and you’ll always be able to get to a charger. We drove from Panther Creek into the Trapper Creek and Indian Heaven hiking areas several times before we had to charge the Solterra, which compares favorably with the times we had to fill the old Outback.

On Charge Delay

We had to charge the car three times this road trip: once on the way down, once in the middle of the trip, and once on the way home. Each charging session took about an hour, using a DC charger, to get the car back to 90% charge. EV charging takes time, but on a curve: the first 25% of the pack will charge in about 10 minutes; the next 50% of the car takes about 50 minutes; and each percent thereafter can initially take two minutes each, but climbs to five minutes for the last three or four percent.

But an hour’s charge will give you about 75% to 80% of your car’s total range, and that’s usually enough to get moving. If you plan your road trips well, you can always find a nice park or cafe to wait out the charge, and at my age naps are lovely anyway. The Solterra has something called, I kid you not, “Your Room Mode,” which allows you to leave some parts of the car on even while it’s charging, such as the radio, the AC or the heater.

I’m simply not in such a hurry that an hour-long “pit stop” with bathroom breaks, a chance to stretch my legs, and maybe buy a few snacks or a coffee, every three hours of travel is a tragedy and a conundrum.

On the flip side, hydroelectric power is ridiculously cheap. With gas prices as they are, the Outback’s efficiency was such that for every dollar of gasoline you put into the tank, it got 4 or 5 miles of range. For the Solterra, on a commercial charge, it got 13 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Oh, and residential, off-peak (i.e. between 10pm and 6am) charging? The Solterra gets 68 miles per dollar put into the battery.

Two Batteries

The Solterra, like its equivalents, the Toyota BZ4X and the Lexus RZ 450e, has two batteries. The first is the one you see all the time on your dashboard, and it’s called the Traction Battery. The other one is a plain, old-fashioned, unremarkable lead-acid thing called the Accessories Battery. The latter powers “everything else” in the car: the radio, the seat warmers, the headlights and interior lights, the door locks. It’s charged from the Traction Battery when you’re driving, providing a moderating pass-through much the same way such batteries do on ICE cars with their alternators. When the car is officially “off,” though, it discharges in the same way as it would, and it will die if you leave your headlights or the seat warmers on too long. When it gets down, the only warning you’ll get about it is a “Power Low: Please Turn Off Accesories” notification (a big one, you can’t miss it) on your dashboard.

A lot of Solterra owners recommended replacing the lead-acid battery with something more modern; although deep-charging lead-acid batteries exist, that battery slot on the Solterra can handle a lithium-based automotive battery, of which there are now several. I haven’t decided if it’s a problem serious enough to warrant replacing it before it’s time. But if you see the warning often enough, have your dealer check the health of the Accessories Battery, because some of them sat idle and uncharged for months on a dock somewhere, and that’s not at all healthy for lead-acid batteries.

3.5 M/KWh city, 2.8 M/KWh highway

The similarly-shaped and platformed Toyota RAV-4 ICE version of our car says that it gets 27 miles per gallon in city driving, and 33 miles per gallon highway driving. For the first automotive century, highway driving was always more efficient because, frankly, ICE cars are hideously inefficient. Idling uses up gasoline. Accelerating from a dead stop uses a lot of fuel, most of it wasted. On the highway a car needs only maintain a constant speed, and an ICE car with a smart transmission can optimize all of that as much as possible.

An EV, on the other hand, uses zero electricity while sitting at a stoplight. It just sits there, waiting. It doesn’t idle; idling is a phenomenon of not being able to turn the engine off in order to have acceleration ready-to-hand, but electricity, unlike gasoline, is instantaneous. It’s also complete: exactly as much energy goes into getting the car up-to-speed as is needed, no more, and no less.

The faster you drive a car, the bigger the buffer of air compressed by the nose travelling through the atmosphere becomes and the more drag the car experiences. For an ICE car, the inefficiency of city driving is so bad that ICE cars are still more efficient at highway speeds than in the city, but for EVs that reality is reversed.

When we drove home, we had 210 miles on the pack at our average use rate of 3.5M/KWh, and from the charger in Vancouver I estimated we would make it with about 45 miles left on the pack. When we pulled into the driveway there was barely 20 miles left, and the car reported that we’d had about 2.8M/KWh of usage, almost entirely due to driving on Washington’s freeways at 70MPH.

Another thing to factor into range management. What a drag.

Overall

Overall, though, I’m mostly delighted with the Solterra. The LIDAR-informed cruise control and optical lane-keeping features make driving it on the freeways feel safer and easier without encouraging you to take your hands off the wheel; it’s a good balance of being helpful while acknowledging that it’s gonna be a long time before humans can stop paying attention to the road. Although the Solterra’s suspension is a little stiff compared to the Outback or Forester I have owned, that’s compensated greatly by the profound quiet experienced inside a car without any engine grumbling inside its frame. The reduced number of moving parts makes EVs a much lower-maintenance prospect as well. The cabin is comfy as hell, and Subaru, like Volvo, has gone out of its way to provide haptic (touchable, discrete, independent) buttons, levers, and dials, so you can signal, control the lights, the heat & AC, the windows, the locks, all of the usual things, without having to take your eyes off the road and look at a viewscreen. The CAN (controller area network) on these cars has independent modules and redundant wiring, unlike in a Tesla, so it will still work even if the radio is having a bad day. (I once crashed a friend’s Tesla by bringing up a website on the viewscreen while we were waiting at some restaurant.)

Range anxiety is managable, and more chargers installed in more locations will make range anxiety fade away. Charging times will hopefully get better, and in the meantime 180 miles of range followed by an hour of rest is probably not a tragic trade-off for most people. Besides, 90% of all trips are within 6 miles of your home, so most people just won’t have a range-management experience all that often. Knowing about the dual battery issue and more discussion of the the reality of highway driving an EV would be useful before buying one.