That's where I ran into more AI dysfunction from Google's Gemini system. They're a lot better that Brave's AI model, but Gemini still has a lot to learn yet to be considered efficient. Just this morning, as I offered it, yet again, another overnight server error regarding my overnight, automated back up system for my primary server, it gave me two back to back syntax errors for Powershell, that it had to correct, before I could run the script it gave me. I ended up using something a lot less complicated.

For those non-IT tech people reading this, basically what I mean, is that Gemini AI had to be corrected twice when attempting to help me write a command script to correct an error on my server systems.

If this is all I have to deal with now, I'm glad. These are minor issues, compared to what I had to deal with over the last couple of weeks. I'm just glad to get my daily schedule somewhat back to normal. At least for the this week and next, because our kids and grand kids are coming down from Brooklyn, NY to visit the first week of September.

We'll have another house full of young children wanting to play with the dog, and do things here that they can't do in the big city. They live in a brick brownstone in Brooklyn, with no yard to speak of, and the nearest grassy place with trees, is a neighbourhood city park. Whereas, grandpa and grandma have a small, grassy backyard, with trees and flowers, vegetable gardens and state parks nearby to play in.

That, and grandma misses having little children around sometimes. She needs a reason to do things, and this is her favourite thing in the world. I know she regrets a little, not living closer to them so she could spend more time with them, but that's the sacrifice we made moving here, instead of farther north. I have children and grand children in Florida, and we wanted to try and be fair to all of them by moving somewhere nice halfway in between.

We mostly succeeded. We live about six hours south of New York, and twelve to fourteen hours north of my kids in Florida. We get to visit with the kids from New York a lot more than any of my kids in Florida, and that's okay.

My oldest son has a wife who doesn't like to travel very far. She apparently has a lot of medical issues that prevent her from traveling long distances by car, and they can't afford to fly. My daughter lives in a different world with her two daughters, and a husband who also doesn't want to visit with us up here. He's all about visiting with his family in Louisiana, but visiting  his father in-law, not so much. It's easier for my daughter to make excuses because her mother lives with her, for medical reasons, and seems to require more care now. I think it's more about the fact that we don't like parties, and we don't drink alcohol, which he drinks a lot of.

That's okay. Maybe I'll travel down there someday and visit her and my grand daughters. We can drive down there in the RV and stay at a nearby RV campground, instead of imposing on them. That and my ex-wife and I have never gotten along, even though she left over thirty six years ago. She's a very scary woman, even to this day.

This week, I also had to help my oldest son with IT issues with that old desktop computer I sent him. Even though I told him to hook it up to an Ethernet cable, he didn't listen, and when some Microsoft updates came through his weak WIFI signal, the PC crashed.

I advised him to find a Cat cable to hook the PC up with, and try again. I also sent him (at my expense again), another box of IT  equipment that I had laying around in my closet. It's old stuff that's been out of date for years (most of it), but it all still works. A couple of old home routers, a open switch, a PC sound bar, and some other miscellaneous gear I had laying around.

Once he gets it all, I will have to call him and help him set it all up over the phone. But, once we're done, he won't have any more problems with weak signals and internet outages in different parts of his house anymore. I wish I could afford to drive down there and physically help him set all that up, but I can't. As much as I love doing work like that, he lives too far away down in central Florida, and I can't afford the gas now. That, and he doesn't have any RV campgrounds anywhere near where he lives.

It takes us nearly two days drive to get to his house from ours, and even when gas was only $2.85 to $3.00 a gallon, I had to plan ahead and save a little. Now, with gas at $4.00 plus a gallon, forget about it with a gas guzzling RV motor home that only runs about 450 to 500 miles on a 50 gallon tank. I would probably spend close to $500 on just gas to get down there and back. After all the money I spent this year on a new roof for my house, and the computer repairs, I don't have the financial resources to make a trip like that right now.

We might make a trip up north to Pennsylvania or upstate New York this fall, just to get out of the house for a long weekend. That's not near as far as Florida, and we haven't gone anywhere this year, so far, because of Trump. We're starting to get a little cabin fever. Which is why the kids and grand kids coming down for a visit is a welcome change.

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about all of that a little bit here. As most people who know me know, I'm an avid news reader. I watch or read articles at different times of the day to try and stay abreast of everything that's going on around the world.

We live in rapidly changing times, and anything can change quickly now. I'm more worried about the United States economy and financial systems collapsing these days, than any of the wars that Trump has started, or what's going on in Ukraine. They're important, but less so if Trump drives the American economy into another major recession like what we have endured in the past. Only this time, with the national debt now peaking above 40 trillion this week, the thought of the U.S. defaulting is becoming an ever larger shadow over the economy now.

Trump is pretty clueless, but the treasury secretary is doing his best to gaslight the public, and the world at large, that all is good. That the U.S. is still a reliable client to lend money to still, and so on. Anyone with half a brain, and is able to do basic maths, knows better. The interest alone is enough to cripple the economy, and there are more and more signs that it is.

I watched a podcast with Lena Petrova today, where she interviews retired a Air Force officer, and a familiar guest on Judging Freedom. Colonel Kwiatkowski came right out and told everyone in this interview, that the U.S. needs a serious financial, and government reset. A hard one, and I agree with her.

I'm willing to make the sacrifices needed to reset the government, and its financial systems back to a point where we can take care of ourselves. No more imperialistic wars, or disastrous trade deals that only benefit the few, and so on. As she put it, the United States is still pretending that it's the latter part of the 20th century, and they are still the dominant empire of the world. The U.S. military no longer can keep up with the rest of the world in military technology, and it's showing with this war with Iran. I'm of the opinion that we need to bring the troops home, including the ships that are out of date, and that need serious repairs and upgrades the U.S. can no longer afford. It's time to admit it. The U.S. can no longer afford to be the worlds protector anymore.

Let's face it, the U.S. is old for it's age, compared to other empires. It's not that they are old in years, compared to other historical great empires of the past, it's just that the Americans rushed their imperialism onto a world that had already seen what that looked like, and they had, had enough after WWII. That's why the American empire has peaked so quickly after WWII.

It's time they humbly admit their failures, and go home. They need to use their money to shore up their domestic infrastructure that used to be the envy of a lot of places in the world. Those days are long gone. There is a new kid on the block, and Shanghai, China, is the new Dubai, of the world. The U.S. is just another tired fat kid on the play ground of geopolitics, and they're out of breath after trying to bully everyone, while everyone else is racing around them, laughing at their physical distress.

The world is starting to move on without the United States now, and if the U.S. doesn't stop and figure that out soon, the citizens will only suffer even more in the next few years. It won't matter which political party is in charge. No one can do anything to keep the current economic status quo going anymore. It's time to bring the troops home, close the overseas base that are useless for the U.S. economy, and draw down the military industrial complex. Put those returning troops to work building green energy projects, rebuilding ageing infrastructure, and restructuring our agriculture system to weather global warming.

We're finally pulling out of Iraq in September, after twenty three years there. Iraq is making nice with Iran, to a degree, and the U.S. can't do a thing about it anymore. I suspect that the U.S. will have a very minimal military footprint in the middle east very soon. Which would be a good thing.

Now, if only they would do the same thing in Asia (to include Australia), and Europe? The U.S. has finally run out of gas, after all of the geopolitical interventionalism from the last few decades. It's time to come home, and restructure the economy and financial systems so the tax money gets spent on the people, instead of foreign imperialism. It's also time to completely overhaul the current government system that favours the wealthy, instead of the rank and file citizens. If we draw down the defence budget back to a reasonable amount, and redirect that money into domestic projects, life would improve, and we could then reset our relationships with the other nations of the world that Trump has trashed.

I know, I'm just dreaming. It could all be done, if we the people stand up and demand our government do all of that, and more for us. Starting with the democrat takeover of the government this fall, we have to hold their feet to the fire, and make them take better care of us. We can't afford more of the same. The same, is what got us into this mess we're in right now.

Nope, it's time that the United States stands back and takes stock of what it has left to work with, and decide how best to use what they have for the good of its people, before it all comes crashing down, and we end up with anarchy and violent civil unrest on the streets. We've seen this before, and we didn't like it then. With the right people in congress, it doesn't have to happen again. They just have to come up with a fiscal plan that changes the financial system of the country that redirects the people's money to line items that benefit domestic projects, and not foreign interests, or the morbidly wealthy.

When FDR set up his original plans to bring the country out of the great depression of the 1930's, he was told that the very wealthy would leave the country and take their money with them. He laughed, and bid them all a good bye.

We don't have a FDR to do that for us again, and the wealthiest are already leaving the country. I read that Mark Zuckerberg has purchased a 440 acre Irish castle in Ireland recently. Jeff Bezos apparently spends a lot of time on his super yacht, that doesn't need any foreign land, other than a dock once in a while. The rest of the one percenters probably also have other passports and real estate in other countries to escape to, while the rest of us suffer through the mess they, and their corporate predecessors, have created since the end of WWII.

Good riddance as far as I'm concerned. We don't need them. We can take over their corporate assets and turn them into profitable for the workers, businesses. We can dump all of the military defence contracts and re-negotiate better ones for the people of the country, and not the pentagon, and their cronies.

I can see a form of socialism reshaping the United States someday soon, all the while keeping the bill of rights intact. It can be done, if enough people come together, and make it happen. Imagine if the United States were to turn into a more benevolent country, instead of a greedy imperialist? Imagine a society that wanted to live in cooperation with the rest of the world, for the benefit of everyone, everywhere? It sounds utopian, but it's not that far fetched of an idea. Especially when the people of the planet may have to make a stark choice within the next few decades, about whether to learn to cooperate, or kill each other off in order to hoard whatever basic resources are left to care for what's left of the human population.

Once the global mean temperature reaches that magic number of life unsustainability within the next fifty years or so, those will be the only two choices left to decide. Life with global cooperation, or death by tribalism. I vote for global cooperation and life.

Those are my weighty thoughts for this week. I hope I gave anyone reading this something to think about as the future bears down on us more and more every year. I know I'm feeling that weight a lot more as I get older and I watch the world I knew come apart at the seams. I truly hope the Americans can figure out how to extricate themselves out of the mess they've created. If not, and they end up defaulting on their national debts, we can use the fall of the old U.S.S.R as an example of what the future of the American people will likely look like when it does go down. It wasn't very pretty.