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Traces
In 1976 most fireplugs were painted to celebrate the bicentennial. When I moved here in 1990 those colors were still sharp and bright. I hadn’t bothered to look closely until this morning’s walk. The colors are still vaguely visible, reddish traces on top and whitish traces below. Since I’m taking PAINS to be positive and…
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Reward crime, punish honesty 2
We’re into fire season now, expected at some point every summer. We had a blessedly cool June, but nature eventually catches up. Tomorrow we’ll get some wind, not enough to notice in cool weather, enough to explode fires right now. The Weather Bureau is giving a precise and clear warning: When you see a Red…
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Drive-thru Day
Today is Drive-Thru Day, so I’ll reprint one of my favorite Lost Places. = = = = = START 2014 REPRINT: In the era of satellite pix and Flickr and Instagram, odd places are thoroughly documented online in precision digital form. Mysterious places that disappeared before the current era have to be pulled back to…
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Martian would think
The proverbial Martian archeologist digging through videos from this decade would conclude that most of the population was infected by a horrible parasite that grew out of the ears, expanded into giant spheres connected by a curved stolon, and consumed all of the hair. [Hmm. After seeing my Martian character in this scene… He might…
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Silly dream
An especially silly but cheerful dream this morning. I was going to carjack a car and rob the people. But I noticed the car had an interesting shift lever, so instead of carjacking I asked them to show me how it worked. They showed me the details of the linkage. Then I walked to the…
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Drip Gas reprint
Mentioned in previous item on waste water. Reprinted from 2016. = = = = = START REPRINT: Let’s go back to Polistra’s Cave Gas station, the location that represents Patient Things. Where would a Patient Gas Station get its gas? In the earliest days of cars and fuel, some gas stations got their gasoline directly…
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Water isn’t the consumable
Basic rule: Protestors are always working for Deepstate whether they know it or not. Government creates two sides so it can punish one side and “follow the will of the people” on the other side. One of the main complaints against AI data centers is the use of water for cooling. The complaint is a…
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Tabling vs tabling
New PM Burnham is starting right and speaking straight. We don’t know how far he’ll go, but he does have the backing of his party with a good majority in Parliament. He is proposing a new direction, which in Britspeak is tabling a proposal. Burnham says it’s time to “end rough sleeping”. US governments at…
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Latest on the Anthropic lawsuit
July 21: Latest update: The judge has given final approval and the payout will start. = = = = = May 15: A judge in Frisco heard the final set of arguments and objections. The basic decision was already pled out by a settlement agreement last year, so the money WILL be paid in some…
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Headline words
Newspaper headlines and radio announcers had a vocabulary of short words replacing longer words. I was thinking about famed. It was standard headlinese, but it only saved one letter vs famous. It also saved a syllable, which must have been why it stuck. While pondering this deep philosophical conundrum, I noticed a headline in the…
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Sounds extremely good.
Burnham’s first speech is short but perfect. He wants to end rough sleeping in Britain. Brits like understatement but they can also speak with less euphemism. No American politician would ever be so straightforward. We pussyfoot around the question with bizarre phrases like Individuals Experiencing Distinctive Domesticity. Mostly they don’t talk about the problem at…
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Y no Dewey for code?
Question asked by somebody on substack, aka Onlyfans For Books: We have lots of new categories in books. Have librarians been updating Dewey and LC to keep track? Easy answer: We don’t have new categories. Cybernetics isn’t new at all. Academic journals and popular scientific books have been discussing it in detail since the 1930s.…
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Sounds good…
As I’ve observed a trillion times, England’s system works. It worked in 1776 and it still works. We replaced it with a system that was EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO FAIL, solely to benefit the richest fuckheads and tax evaders. In the parliamentary system a PM is more like a foreman than a CEO. He is elevated…
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Reward crime, punish honesty.
Rewarding crime and punishing honesty is COOL now. Cities and states refuse to jail thieves, so stores turn into prisons for honest people. Companies reward hackers and punish honest users. Canvas was expertly hacked by an organized gang who worked through Canvas’s private Github area to locate user data, then captured millions of users and…
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Just because all the cool kids…
Classic story of faddish stupidity. The Australian stock market had a smoothly functioning computer system. This means it was written in COBOL. Smoothly functioning == COBOL. So they decided to make it COOL instead of COBOL. What’s really really cool? Bitcoin! They spent 7 years and untold millions of dollars fucking around, trying to develop…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 