PS: Why Jarvanka, though? I guess Jared was some sort of insider, or "in the know". Then, well, Ivanka was his daughter, so ... What a stupid move, having those 2 anywhere around him except at meals or ceremonies.

PS: "Trump suffers from Trust issues, which is one reason we got JarVanka, and is oddly enough insecure, which is why he was star-struck with the treacherous Generals on his staff as well as the other experts."

EXACTLY, Alarmist! I was thinking of writing this same thing after I had just read your 1st paragraph. Yes, he is a confident guy in general, but I guess he's used to underlings who not only know what they're doing but are loyal to him, not loyal to the Deep State. At this new job, he figured he'd get some underlings who knew what they were doing, you know, local guys, from the Beltway, actually Swamp... the one he was supposed to be draining!

"Trump never had the courage to go with his gut; His escalator speech in Trump Tower was purely his gut; his Presidency was The Apprentice with a bad director." I never watched the show, but I did read of the speech at Trump Tower. Yep, purely from his gut and what good Americans had been so longful to hear.

PS

I’ve met Trump in the ‘90s, and he did not strike me as dumb. He can talk to Joe Sixpack in Joe’s language, which is why he resonates with so many of the common folk rather than trying to sell it to the self-identifying Intelligentsia who would never vote for him anyway.

Trump suffers from Trust issues, which is one reason we got JarVanka, and is oddly enough insecure, which is why he was star-struck with the treacherous Generals on his staff as well as the other experts. Trump never had the courage to go with his gut; His escalator speech in Trump Tower was purely his gut; his Presidency was The Apprentice with a bad director.

Despite his Hyde Park intonations, FDR could talk in simple terms to the common folk and lead them to believe he really cared for him. He was every bit as monstrous as Stalin in some respects, but without the need to kill as many.

PS
PS
Mr. Trump's fifth grade level - is a form of political science.
I go here not only with Douglas Adams - I also follow Matt Taibbi, who has done lots of reporting onTrump and followed quite some speeches and said: As political rally speeches - - - great.
Douglas Adams is camp Occam. he tries hard to achieve this - high! - goal by leaving out all things that don't count. which makes him a writer able to bring complex matters (like self-improvement in order to succeed economically - this is complex stuff!!) to the masses in a way those masses like - - = in a successful way.
What Adams and Taibbi get about Trump's speech-style is that he works with surprises and - wit and humor. And all of these are complex matters.

Oh - another one in team "Trump ain't talking dumb" - - is Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson even dared say that is no easy task to be successful in reality TV,as Trump was.

I trust these three bright and well educated men Adams, Taibbi and Peterson way more than the cognitive science crowd out to - grab Trump by his - - -prole-Hair-design and - - - drag him around in circles - - - as: The newest sensation: The officially dumb man. - And let me please in this context hint at Trump's opponent: A man named Joe Biden...This opponent makes everything that is said against Donal Trump's niveau .a.b.s.u.r.d., I'd go this far here.

Btw. - - to retell the Begian suicide story as a Chatbot-love-story detracts the public from the fact, that Climate Change has turned into a wordlwide doom-story - - - with a harsh psychological price-tag. 

PS

RE: Adam Smith citing recent data that 54% of Americans "read below a sixth grade level."

A few years ago, a team of Reading Experts got to studying presidential speeches back to the late 1920s and up through the late 2010s. Their results that alarmed them and were widely trumpeted for a time.

The president whose public speeches were at the highest level was Herbert Hoover (who was in fact a brilliant self-made man; he gets something of a bad rap in popular-memory but was of the classic American type of excellence).

Jimmy Carter (still living as of this writing but who for some reason already got obituaries printed a few weeks ago) also spoke at a high level.

Both Hoover and Carter, in the grade-level scale applied to their public speeches, spoke at 11th-grade levels. I expect this may be the highest level possible in the spoken word.

The LOWEST grade-level speaker of the 20th century was: Harry Truman (6th grade level).

Most presidents cluster at the 8th or 9th grade levels. FDR and 'Dubya' Bush both failed to make the 8th-grade cut and narrowly finished with 7th-grade levels.

However, the lowest of all was Donald J. Blompf. He spoke at a 5th grade level. So sayeth the Reading Experts.

If the majority are not competent in following the (formerly usual) 8th- and 9th-grade-level discourse of "a man like Herbert Hoover again," they WERE able to relate to the Orange Man.

I have to knowledge or recollection of it but I feel quite sure that the Trump-backer Scott Adams at the time commented positively on the low-grade-level result for Trump. Scott Adams (who is still life-banned from cartooning for Racism) is a smart man, but wrote his WIN BIGLY book in a very simple style, almost like a children's book. It is a style that an author like that would not have done in previous eras, I think.

PS: Good evening, everyone,

Mr. Alarmist, that would be a contemporary sixth-grader. (If 54% of Americans were as intelligent as sixth-graders in the 1890's America would be in much better shape.)

https://grandfather-economic-report.com/1895-test.htm
https://www.shsd.org/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=1709251

https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912ans.html

Thanks for the info about swisscows, Dieter. Also, many thanks to you and Mr. Hail about the Belgian Chatbot suicide story...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210824-always-there-the-ai-chatbot-comforting-china-s-lonely-millions

Cheers! ☮

PS: M, I appreciate the quick lesson on this authentication problem and algorithms for trying to sort out humans from other software. It's gonna take 3 or 4 readings for me, though ...

PS: Thank you for filling us in on more of that purported "love story", but actually story of depression, Mr. Kief. You know what I think of the entire Climate Calamity™ Industry. How many people has the "industry" killed so far. Worse yet, how many children whose parents may or may not have some perspective in the matter, but even in the latter case not have the time or knowledge to set their children's minds at ease, will become like this man in the long run.

Greta Thunberg is both an example of one of those children and an example of someone working (and making good money) out of this "industry". It is more evil than just the lies. It seems to be giving children a poor outlook on life - if they want that, I can give it to them! It won't be about the Climate of the whole freaking Earth though - I see a bad moon rising myself, but it's about financial and political madness. The Planet's fine - it's the people that are fucked. (Thank you, George Carlin!)

PS
Sorry - another way to determine a user is authentication. This is however something glued onto HTTP - if a user gets authenticated then the logs can say "user x made this request", but it's not part of the protocol (at least not for the versions I'm used to).
It's also orthogonal to bots vs. humans.
- A search engine is a bot and is almost never authenticated (at least not in the wild).
- A human can be authenticated or not (anonymous or guest usage).
- The bot that people are concerned about is a program that signs up for an account (or is signed up) and is authenticated, then uses the site in a way that pretends to be a human.

It may be possible to look at usage for a user and say "I think this is a bot", but it's not trivial.

PS
Re: Hail
I haven't even considered the source (bot vs. human) yet in my account.

The basics are that a request comes to a server using the HTTP protocol. This request names a "resource" (the simplest type is a file, but there's more complication there). That's it. The request contains a return address and (optionally) a "user agent" which is an indicator of what sort of software the requester is using. There are a few other (also optional) pieces of info in the request that can be used.

The server processes the request and sends back a response, which includes a status code. Depending on the requested resource, this can include an encoded file.

The request and the response code are logged for later analysis.

The analysis software scans the logs and decides which requests come from the same "user" and during the same "visit" based on timing and the info (address, user agent, etc.).

It can also do some analysis on which users are bots and which could be humans. This was useful for e.g. seeing how often Google's search engine was looking at your site for new stuff.

Newer versions of HTTP do things a little differently - I'm not as up on those. One difference is that the versions I'm used to are "stateless" - each request/response is its own thing and not part of a "session", while the new version has a "session". This can make distinguishing users and visits easier.
"Stateless" allows a server to service requests from more users while using a smaller memory footprint, while "stateful" allows for faster servicing of requests once you establish a session. They were designed for different eras - the version I'm used to is over 20 years old, which is prehistoric for computers.

Sorry if this is long, it's hard to condense this...

PS

Re: Belgian suicide, Mr. Hail et. al., Swiss Cow-search engine - Adam et. al.

PS

Been offline and saw lots of people lately 3-d. So:

The Swiss-Cow-Search-Engine is Swiss and uses google data on their own terms. I know of people who like it and use it.
The Swiss surprise at times. They also created an alternative to ebay, which turned out to beat ebay in Switzerland - - -and make tons of money for the media-families of old that own the TAMEDIA group - the biggest Swiss media firm. - Their latest blossom is very green and left leaning and popular young media-personality and lit-crit and playwright Laura de Weck... Old Palo Altan knew the de Wecks ...btw. and laughed quite a bit about young Laura.

The Belgian Chatbot-suicide was - as the french paper Le Soir has it - - was not the suicide of somebody who fell in love with a chatbot. It was the suicide of a very depressed (=suicidal...) man.

https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/chatgpt-un-belge-se-suicide-apres-avoir-trouve-refuge-aupres-d-un-robot-conversationnel-20230329
 
As is always the case with highly psychotic/ neurotic / suicidal persons, those persons search for mirroring suicidal tendencies in real life they then .u.s.e. to confirm their auto aggressive tendency. The Frenchman had already decided what his - end-of-everything-matrix, so to speak, was, namely and explicitly climate change as the most powerful sign showing that the world was indeed nearing the end. In this state of mind he did turn to the chatbot, which his wife seems to have found out .a.f.t.e.r. his suicde and declared to be the possible reason for his suicide... - - - and she added: If not for his death directly, then for enhancing his suicidal tendencies!
As the cool eye that I am, looking at the world, I have to say: That the suicidal tendencies of her husband needed enforcemnt to be realised is the .t.h.e.o.r.y. of a disturbed wife after her husband had - after a long time of depression, killed himself.

Since I'm not unacquainted with these kinds of people, I may add something quite obvious if you think about it: People like her are the most unreliable source you can think of if you are interested to find out why her husband took his life.

What the chatbot-love-affair 's concerend, Le Soir, a widely read and reliable French daily, says that the wife of the suicidal husband mentioned in conversation that the chatbot was like a love-affair for him. - - - - - So .s.h.e. brought that up - en passant, as the French put that...

What the chatbot did was to affirm the man in his strong beliefs, that everything was going downhill and the world would end soon because of climate-change. Seventy years ago, he might have read little mags that would have affirmed his beliefs that men from outer space have taken over control of the earth already and will soon kill us all - - - as Dr.Freud rightfully said time and time again: The strength of our phantasies is not to be underestimated:They are a t least 50 % of the energy that  - - drives us, deep down inside of our bodies (.i.n.c.l.u.d.i.n.g. our brains) = our selves.

PS

Morning, Mr Smith. Would that be a contemporary sixth-grader, or would it be a sixth-grader of our grandfathers’ day?

I’ve seen eighth-grade tests from the 1890s that most current US university students could not pass.

PS: Just to be clear...

54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. = ~120 million potential voters.

Happy Sunday!

☮

PS: Greetings, Mr. Hail,

About the non-reading majority...

According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of Americans read below a sixth grade level. 21% are functionally illiterate. 21 to 23% of adult Americans are "not able to locate information in text". This is ~120 million potential voters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

Happy Sunday!

☮

PS

There was an Isaac Asimov story about people in a high-tech world who had steadily lost the ability to read or write because everything talks to them and they can do voice commands. Two boys discover some ancient writing, which they call "squiggles" as they lack a proper word for it and marvel over it like a certain type of boy today might marvel over an unknown set of hieroglyphics.

In the story the boys ultimately resolve to try to track down the oldest and most-eccentric librarian, archivist, or museum-keeper or the like, a man they hope can decipher the squiggles for them and maybe teach them squiggles. They get super-excited that they might be able to communicate in this new way. The non-reading majority in this distant human future, it is implied, think the aspiring "squiggles" readers have gone a little crazy.

Are we on the path to that world?

PS

M wrote: "The move to audiovisual stuff (first podcasts, now Youtube videos) is a measure of luxury - we can afford to waste this extra bandwidth because we now have the underlying infrastructure to do so. There is some value in seeing facial expressions etc. though probably not enough to be worth it. It's hard to skim a video for whether it's interesting or if it just repeats the same arguments"

Good points.

This is, incidentally, a point that I often see made here at Peak stupidity. Mr. Moderator says he does not do long-form Youtube-video viewing because the info-to-time ratio is so poor.

In a lot of cases the points made in a Youtube video could be summarized in, say, one-tenth the time and at some far-greater reduction in bandwidth, I guess. Plus I notice the life-expectancy of text on the Internet is a lot longer than that of videos.

The problem with the rise of video-based commentary, however, goes beyond even any of those things. Rigorous reading and writing being devalued.

PS

RE: M, on the subject of page-views, page-visits, and perils of trying to count traffic

What about the problem of bots? Non-human traffic.

It's not a new feature of the Internet world, but lately the idea has entered pretty fully into the mainstream, especially with the controversy over what % of Twitter accounts are distinct human beings and what % are fake one way or another.

PS

I just saw a similar story on ZH, and the fascinating thing is PornHub, with 2.5 billion monthly views, is the 13th most visited site, just behind Amazon at 2.6 billion.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition there.

PS
I should not have used that language in the first place. Call it a failure of resolve on my part to reduce bad language on the web generally. I think over-usage has cheapened it to uselessness.

Not to get too technical, but there's a "time-to-live" on pages. It can be set in the browser or on the server as a default, or each page can have one in the headers. Each caching server in the chain from your browser to the original server can have its own setting. The idea is to reduce traffic, while not allowing a possibly old and inaccurate version to show up for the user.
If the time-to-live has not expired, the browser can check for a new version but does not have to. If it has expired, then it must check if there is a new version (usually it just requests the page again, but the server can just say "No new version" back).
Yes, there can be multiple caching servers. Your ISP can have one. A lot of high-traffic servers use things like Cloudflare, which do just that.
This is why a lot of websites say "clear your cache" to fix some errors. They've set up a new version, but your browser (or app) might not want to request it.
Google Analytics is complicated. And you are correct that all the data ends up with Google.

TLDR; measuring this stuff is complicated, and depends to some extent on what you want to end up with. Sounds a bit like every other scientific experiment, no?

The move to audiovisual stuff (first podcasts, now Youtube videos) is a measure of luxury - we can afford to waste this extra bandwidth because we now have the underlying infrastructure to do so. There is some value in seeing facial expressions etc. though probably not enough to be worth it. It's hard to skim a video for whether it's interesting or if it just repeats the same arguments - much easier to do for a blog post. Advertising seems to be harder to remove from AV stuff as well.

PS: M, first of all you don't have to use **'s around here. We're friends, and there's no WP or DISQUS or what-have-you to knock out your comments. (The site does this by itself, haha!)

OK, well, if you mean confound it on purpose, that's one thing - like my using the search engines to search for "Peak Stupidity" incessantly.*

With caching, I didn't know one could reload the whole page without the browser checking for a refresh from the server. That's a setting I guess, right? (I know Adam Smith and I have gone through this long ago.)

Regarding visits, one can install the "google analytics" code that sends the server info that the browser is still "on" that page (whatever "on" means, because one can be reading on another tab or whatever). My friend uses that on his site, but I want nothing to do with anything google, so it's not on here. (It was also good for helping the user view the hits to his site geographically.)

I don't know the ins and outs you do. There is no measure that I can see that just says "this is how much people are using the site". Bytes sent down the line, as I wrote, are kind of a measure of this, but than how does one video of the Kardashians compare to the same number of bytes in a couple of books on Western Civilization?

Thanks for your input, M.


* That brings up a question: Do you think that google, et al have programming that looks at continual same search requests from same IP numbers in order to look for these "ringers" that want to up their positions on the results page? Yeah, I could make a script to do it, but I don't care THAT much.

PS: Alarmist, hat long analysis by Mr.Hail is something that I think would be a great post on his site, but I appreciate it - I will write under that previous post to Mr. Hail, with some answers to a few questions.

I think one can analyze this stuff a whole lot further than he did. It could go on, because that was really so much data.

PS
"Page views" is b*sh*t - there are so many ways to confound it.
- hitting "refresh" can cause the counter to go up - or not.
- caching - your ISP can cache the page and serve it up again to you (or your neighbor) without letting the original site know.
- created pages (ASP etc.) can cause page views to be completely wrong. You can have many news stories coming from a single (ASP) page, depending on the query arguments (or the POST body arguments if it's badly constructed). Or you can have multiple page views from a single page when you're filling in a form using AJAX to get e.g. the values for different drop-downs.

Visits are constructed, and are generally not much more accurate. HTTP is a stateless protocol, which basically means the start and end of a visit are inferred rather than coming from the actual usage.

Sorry - I've had a decade or so trying to explain this stuff to people whose background is distributing paper pamphlets on safe drug usage etc.

PS

Rule number one of good writing is to be pithy, not prolix.