Consider these Oft used so called PC, yet vague decriptors when referring to individuals of a certain persuasion or affiliation and you realize how lame it sounds-
1. You and your loved ones
2. Men and women in uniform
3. People familiar with the matter
4. Highly placed sources
5. Significant other
Switching gears I began wondering why certain sports or what are defined as a sport get notoriety to where people pay lot of money to see it in person or on other mediums sponsored by large advertising budgets.
Consider the 100 m dash and all other dash variants and you just might see how insane this activity seems. At the end of the 9 or so seconds it's all over and yet it enthralls the minds of many. What exactly does one achieve after running very very fast or cycling till the cows come home that they become national heroes? Not to mention some are later found to be lacking in moral fiber and the same nitwits that paid their last paycheck to see these clowns are up in arms about shattering their role model.
Large sporting equipment makers pay top dollar to have these athletes once from an impoverished continent wear their footwear.
But consider the trapeze artist on a high wire or the contortionist in a circus and there is not that adulation. What makes some act of human exertion Olympian vs the other? It's marketing.
This time for a tech conference in the realm of what else? AI. But applied to an oft neglected space called Knowledge Management. The latter is a community of practice that focuses on analyzing, organizing and making available reams of data that have been gathered over time by various functions within an organization for anyone in the company to utilize. This function or process is ripe for applying AI agents (or agentic AI framework) and optimize for better outcomes. It was informative. More rewarding was getting acquainted with folks who practice this craft as well as learning of what they see in the corporate or public sectors. Since the venue was Washington DC it also afforded me the chance to take evening strolls albeit the weather was trying. With wind chill in the single digit it still is a glamorous place to perambulate through history absorbing what this country has been through since its founding days. I was able to visit the place Lincoln was killed along with his monument t...
Read Umberto Eco for his take on why all organised sport watching is a fairly useless activity. Worse, it takes away from actually doing something useful to yourself or to others. Except making some (not all) athletes rich, as you point out.
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