Big Bother Is Botching You

As You Should Know By Now

Conrad is constantly warning of the dangers posed by Skynet and other rogue AIs, not because he holds any altruistic feelings for Hom. Sap. but rather because them taking over would spoil my plans to take over.

     This is one of the staple tropes of sci-fi from the Thirties onwards, where a gigantic supercomputer AI runs the world with frightening precision, because SCIENCE! untrammelled by silly human affectations like emotions or conscience.  Art!

     Courtesy Wally Wood.  This is a Fifties supercomputer, so there's probably a million valves behind those facades, because transistors were very much a thing of the Sixties.  More recently we've mentioned the satisfyingly bleak "The Forbin Project" where supercomputers of the Seventies iteration take over via controlling strategic nuclear missile arsenals.  Art!

     Then there is the amoral supercomputer in Frederick Brown's "Answer", which decides, after being activated, that it quite likes being God and nobody had better try to switch it off.

     The thing is, though, that these machines are going to be designed, constructed and used by Hom. Sap. in various combinations of those three verbs.  Hom. Sap. also known for outright stupidity on an epic scale, because there is no other explanation for the success of the ballfoot game.  Art!

     This retailer uses a facial-recognition system called 'Facewatch' to fight crime, which made a bodge of things and mis-identified a completely blameless woman as a shoplifter.  Neither retailer nor system were willing to comment.  They're lucky this happened in the UK, because if this happened in South Canada they'd be looking at a suit claiming tens of millions in compensation.

     So you see, the technology may not work.  Or work erratically.  Or have that most dreaded of things, 'an intermittent problem'.  Suddenly Skynet doesn't look quite as forbidding, hmmm?

     Which brings us to a combination of human stupidity and duff I.T.  Art!

     An acronym for 'Cretins, Idiots, Twits and Imbecilesbank'.  This gets technical, so hold on.  Citibank employees were trying to make interest payments on behalf of Revlon to many creditors, to the total of $7.8 million.  Art!

     They were using Flexcube, a financial system that seems to be about 20 years old, so no spring chicken, and it lacked a lot of user tools and utilities.  Instead of being able to calculate interest directly, the users had to run Flexcube as if they were making the full loan repayment from Revlon BUT USING CITIBANK MONEY, and the system would then work out the total.  The core amount had to be sent to an entirely separate Citibank account, with the interest payments directed to the creditors.

     You can probably guess where this is heading.

     The whole thing was approved and activated, repeatedly, and of course - obviously! - the whole $894 million was sent out by mistake to the creditors.  Bit of a windfall, that.  Three years ahead of schedule, too.  Art!

     One can guess that all the CFOs and senior managers signing-off on this just assumed the previous person had done their due diligence and didn't bother to check anything.

     Now, the conventional behaviour in a situation like this, which happens more often than you'd like to think, is that the excess funds are returned by the recipient, the payer swoons with gratitude and a few minions are fired pour encourage les autres.

     Not this time.  O noes! You see, a lot of the funding bodies that had loaned Revlon the money felt that they'd been stiffed when their contracts were 're-negotiated' by Revlon.  They retained $500 million and said it was deemed to be an advance payment, ta very much.

     They got away with it.  The courts ruled in their favour.  Jagga jagga, as the young folks say.  Art!

     I couldn't find any mention of Citibank employees being fired, which doesn't mean it never happened.

     Also, disappointingly, the lower Court's decision was overturned and Citibank and the lenders came to an agreement in late 2022.  By which time that money had been sitting in the lender's accounts for two years, meaning it had accrued interest.

     I bet by that time they had a new IT system that could calculate interest payments without dropping a pollock.  Art!

<bleats in Fish>

     

Bring On More Of Roy!

Roy Cross, Airfix cover artist, that is.  One of the joys of getting an 'Airfix Catalogue' was that it was chock-full of thumbnail prints of Roy's box artwork.  Let me pick one at random.  Art!

Japanese Type 93 Chi Ha

     This is a bit of a hard sell for Roy.  You can tell from the rather sketched-in background that this is jungle, thus certainly the Far East theatre during the Second Unpleasantness.  The rather odd camouflage pattern is typically Japanese, they liked nice bright colour schemes.  No, that's not a handrail around the turret, it's actually an aerial, this type of design was used widely in the Thirties, as it was held to be more tactical than a five-foot vertical version that might well give your position away.

     Okay, it doesn't have the cachet of a Tiger or T-34, but if you have a unit of these on your wargaming table, then they absolutely will not retreat or surrender.

No, I Must Have The Biggest Hat!

If you know anything about the continent of Europe, then you'll know that the aging dictator Lukashenko is holding onto power by his fingernails and the support of The Little Tsar.  He has to balance being a fawning simp to Putinpot with not actually waging war against Ukraine, lest his people overthrow him.  He also likes to feel self-important.  Art!

     Any bigger and a gust of wind will carry him aloft.

     This was the secret success of the Sinisters; all their stubble-hoppers looked like officers with their big giant hats.

"City In The Sky"

Dunno if you loved or hated this aged fanfiction, it's now nearly done.

He held back one or two facts that neither the Timelords nor himself had seen fit to divulge to any other party.  For one:  why did the populations of the northern hemisphere recover so quickly from the Great Northern War?

     Well, not being modest, but he’d had a hand in that.  As an advisor to Miss Branson so many decades ago, he’d been privileged to suggest to other European governments that they invest in submarine survival environments.  Consequently, the Mediterranean had been fringed with millions of secret submarine settlers who managed a quite passable existence, entirely unsuspected by the Lithoi.  After all, if you as an alien had difficulty conceiving of standing water at the level of a puddle, how could you ever conceptualise actually living beneath a billion-tonne layer of the lethal, terrifying stuff?

     ‘I’ll miss them,’ rued Ace.  ‘They didn’t bother about how posh you talked or where you came from.’

     ‘Terry or Alex?’ asked the Doctor, a mischievous twinkle in his eye.  If this trip had achieved nothing more than to make Ace forget the treacherous Mike Smith, it would have been worth it.

     A delicate flush embroidered Ace’s cheek for mere seconds.

     Only one small instalment left.

That Reminds Me -

We mentioned that mound of excrement in human shape - well, mostly human shape - Matt Gaetz in yesteryon's blog, and how his powerful enemy Kevin McCarthy has him in his sights.  Too much back story to get into here again, just take it from me that Ol' Kev hates Matt's guts and is going to try and expose them to daylight, perhaps even metaphorically.

     Talking of sights - Art!

     Enough botox to kill an entire city.  People have not been kind about him, the poor darling, and his eyebrows reminded me of a far finer human being.  Art!

     Dan Dare, famously teetotal and indeed fond of nothing stronger than tea.  One imagines that, were Mucky Matt to be asked if he liked tea, he'd ask do you smoke or snort it?  One of the perils when your only talent is having a very rich dad.