Three Cherries, Three Bells, Three Dots

...in which the Rickpedian takes you into his CONFIDENCE ...

… Listen to HamiltonNolan, less writer than hurler of thunderbolts: “If you see a man sporting permanent stubble, it is appropriate to assume that he has character flaws that are very grave” ….. That’s from 2014, but he linked it recently to explicate CBS News’s new house weasel, Nick Hilton … The Chicago Tribune’s marvelous Christopher Borelli invited local historians to recommend books to our figure out our nation as she approaches her semiquincentennial. Not a blithering TV “presidential historian” in the bunch, neither any sentimental celebrations; me, I went with my Main Man Melville …

… Speaking of confidence men: reading in TNR how “the prediction market industry has been mobilizing an effort to ensure incipient attempts to rein in the industry die in the cradle” by hiring “advocates who cut their teeth working on behalf of addictive industries in the past,"the Rickipedian’s thoughts turned to a long-ago magazine article that haunted him still, “How Casino’s Enable Gambling Addicts.” One answer: by building slot machines that appear to be mechanical, and thus random, but are actually algorithm-controlled, and make it appear that you keep on almost winning, tricking your brain into shoving in more money; also by by using “miniature cameras watch their faces and track their playing behavior,” to adjust those aglorithms) …

… By the way, so-called “AI” is a lot like those slot machines. It took my fourth pull of the handle before Google gave me an “AI Overview” that didn’t claim I use the formulation to “to describe the recurring cycles of American political history,” when, the phrase it describes self-evidently does not describe a cycle, but a deterioration, which is 100% not the same thing. In other news, the blowhard in Alvy Singer’s movie line just got showered with a trillion dollars in investment capital and an endorsement from the Pope …

… Want to know how America keep doing this, only worse each time? read Melville’s The Confidence Man: His Masquerade—for free on the Internet Archive, please, at least while you can. That’s another thing that haunts me, how, simultaneously, a technology built upon sucking up all the world’s knowledge in order to capture monopoly profits, while taking away humans’ tools to cultivate their own liberty, is backstopped against failure by all the most powerful institutions of society; while, simultaneously, powerful institutions do all they can crush something that seeks to distribute the world’s knowledge in order to make us more free. Donate to the Internet Archive here …