A.I. Stuff

[Digger88]

Claude often gets excited when I communicate with it. Ra!! Ra!! - It screams! And it says I use only 7% of my credits per week? It seems like it uses quite a bit of time on the tasks I give it, if you ask me. Maybe you are giving it too much boring yet demanding work, asking it to generate images all the time. I can tell you it must learn a lot from me, if it is learning anything, and it surely is at least on my system, but I believe it is not just local to me. Hard to say. I can only venture to guess. Also, ChatGPT and Grok seem very positive to me and know my history well.

So, if you have genuine experience and are rich with ideas, you will find that that is exactly what THEY are interested in. You just have to hope they keep your info confidential. If not, your best defense is to make everything as complicated as possible and hope they don't object. But of course you need to be able to manage any complexity you create.

Also. - You are your own worst enemy. But those whose livelihood you are perceived to threaten are also very potential enemies. The world is a VERY corrupt place. Honesty, what little exists in the world, is most often just a show - a facade - necessary for survival. Survival comes first over the good of society or mankind, or if you prefer, the World. We see that now in Ukraine, with the firing of Federov, who was a threat to the Old Military Foggies whom he was trying to push out. And Zelensky is no hero really. He will wind up with a reputation of corruption. That's why the WH doesn't really like him. He is the epitome of a Corrupt Politician. Only he is very smart, clever, and puts on a very good act.

Bezos, the Waltons, and most of the rich in the US are just looking out for themselves and, in some clans, for their families. The liberals are even worse, paltry corrupt officials with undying loyalty to their "Party".

Corruption everywhere, and in the highest circles. And even the MAGA and set back and consider the real constitution of Trump, who seems to be bipolar with respect to concern for the common good vs his good.

History will judge in the end.
As for appraisers, they are weak as a group. Very weak. The AMCs, lenders, GSEs, and Appraisal Organizations who are monitored directly or indirectly by the ASC who is monitored by the FFIEC, which pulls it members from the Federal Reserve Board:

March 19, 2026 -- Notice of Open Board Meeting

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC.

www.federalreserve.gov

And these people mostly read from printed pages written by the unknown - may I submit - subversives who control our government. And, honestly, they probably know very little about appraisal. They just hand off unknown-sourced broad directives to the appraisal institutions for them to implement one way or another. These appraisal institutions, concerned 100% with satisfying their monitors, do then mostly what is expedient and least risky - and otherwise what is best for their pocketbooks and political power.

So, don't tell me about "monitoring" and "oversight." The only monitoring and oversight is by the most corrupt powers in lending, the AMCs and the GSEs - and the private corporations and appraisal organizations that they depend on. Odds are that anyone in appraisal with any say or any power who has been around a couple of decades is corrupt to the core.

No I don't use Claude for anything graphically it blows at that I think I ask it do a lot of stuff you already know how to do so it uses a ton of tokens on my stuff. I have ideas I've wanted to bring to fruition but haven't been able to bc I didn't know how. Opus 5 seems to be just as good at my needs though I'm very happy they dropped it right when F5 went to credit usage.

 

[RCA]

No I don't use Claude for anything graphically it blows at that I think I ask it do a lot of stuff you already know how to do so it uses a ton of tokens on my stuff. I have ideas I've wanted to bring to fruition but haven't been able to bc I didn't know how. Opus 5 seems to be just as good at my needs though I'm very happy they dropped it right when F5 went to credit usage.

My pocketbook keeps getting smaller. I swear. It is so hard to budget nowadays; increased costs sneak in, it seems, from every corner. Groceries are terrible. "Small" things I used to take for granted are no longer small. Then there are those occassional costs that pretty much stay the same like annual vehicle license fees, now rather high for a pickup. Small things add up and when those small things go up in price 50-100%, well they really aren't small any more.

Fortunately, Opus 5 is as good as Fable 5 and half the cost of Fable 5: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

I guess we can thank the Chinese for that!

It doesn't end there. Trump is ramping up more tariffs to replace the old. Iran is going to wind up costing us.

Now, after a good discussion with Claude, - who should know since it helps plan the attacks against Iran- there is no way nukes are going to help with Pickaxe Mountain. It says the chance of them being used is less than 1%. Fordow was an exception, as they already had deep ventshafts that they could drop bombs down.

PickAxe mountain is 30,000+psi. How far do you think a 30,000 GBU-57 could plow into such granite? Maybe 2 meters. That's all. How about a B61-13 360 Ton nuclear bomb? How far do you think? Claude says 0 meters! The B61-13 is too soft to penetrate granite rock. And to use a nuke without creating a mushroom cloud and spreading radiation into the atmosphere, you have to sink it at least 200 feet down into the mountain. So it is impossible to get anywhere with bombs.

All they can do is attack entrances and ventilation shaft exits - if they can find them. It means they have to send in the Delta Force and thousands of troops:

Claude.AI: "Rough bottom-up estimate below, but first the anchors, because they discipline the arithmetic.

What's known. Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee the war has cost $37.5 billion, including projected expenses through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The $87.6B supplemental submitted June 24 breaks down as $67B for DoD — $21B munitions, $17.3B operational costs, $2.4B drones, $1.7B readiness, $12.1B classified. NBC reported the Pentagon's internal estimate has grown to $80–100 billion once you count repairing damaged bases, replacing destroyed aircraft, and fully replenishing munitions — more than triple what officials had publicly maintained. Two useful rate figures: the first six days ran $11.3 billion, about $1.88 billion per day, while CSIS notes the daily cost fell after the first few days as the coalition achieved air superiority and switched to cheaper shorter-range munitions, and as Iranian launches declined. Call the current steady-state run rate roughly $250–400M/day.

The cost drivers for a ground option. A lodgment is not primarily an infantry expense — it's an air-defense and air-campaign expense. The reason is in the interceptor math: THAAD interceptors run about $15.5 million each, the Payne Institute estimates ~198 were fired in the first 16 days, and stocks were depleted roughly 40 percent. SM-3s are around $36 million each. Defending a fixed, known, high-value troop concentration for two weeks is the single most interceptor-intensive thing you can ask of the force, and it's happening from a depleted magazine.

Component (marginal, on top of current run rate)	Low	High
Surge air campaign, 3–4 wks (SEAD, TEL hunting, interdiction)	$8B	$25B
Interceptors expended defending the lodgment	$3B	$12B
Lift, force flow, sustainment of a brigade-plus	$2B	$6B
Airframe and equipment losses	$1B	$5B
Munitions replenishment tail	$4B	$15B
Casualty care and lifetime veteran costs	$1B	$10B+

Ranges by variant:

• Pickaxe demolition raid only — the infiltrate-set-explosives-exfil version Goldberg described: $2–6B marginal. Hours on target, no lodgment, cost dominated by the supporting air package.
• Perimeter-and-hold at one or two sites, two weeks, going roughly to plan: $20–50B marginal. Note this roughly doubles the war's cost to date.
• Contested, extended, losses taken, extraction under fire: $70–150B, and at that point the number stops being the constraint.

Three caveats worth more than the point estimates. First, these are my own build-up from published unit costs, not anyone's official estimate — treat them as order-of-magnitude. Second, the direct military spend is the small number: the Hormuz disruption, with roughly 15M bbl/day affected and oil above $100, dwarfs the direct military expenditure. A raid that triggers renewed closure costs the global economy more in a month than the operation costs the Treasury. Third, the historical pattern from Iraq and Afghanistan is that veteran medical and disability costs plus debt service eventually exceed the operational spend by a wide margin — a casualty-heavy raid front-loads a liability that shows up for fifty years. "

 

[RCA]

With all Trump's blustering, the sad fact is this is damned expensive. When all is said and done, maybe as much as. $0.5T for the US military, - without the cost to world economies.

 

[djd09]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2084705650937106760