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Zuck is hopelessly dumb.
Latest example: A jury in Santa Fe fined Facebook $25 billion, payable to the state of NM, for a vague set of charges that aren’t properly fraud, and aren’t offenses against the state of NM. Headlines say the case is about “privacy”, which is also a nonsensical charge, but the “privacy” crap wasn’t in the…
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Y no hydroponics?
Elon’s stupid flying car stunt didn’t even impress his fanboys. Like everything else he does, it’s a rerun of an old technology that didn’t get very far the first time for good reasons. We were supposed to have flying cars in the future. Why didn’t they arrive? Not for technical reasons. Flying cars were fully…
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CAPS LOCK DAY REPRINT
TO OBSERVE CAPS LOCK DAY, I’LL REPRINT MY TRIBUTE TO THE ORIGINAL SHOLES TYPEWRITER. EARLY TYPEWRITERS WERE ALL CAPS WITH NO CHOICE. THE UC/LC CHOICE CAME LATER, SO IN A HISTORICAL SENSE CAPS LOCK IS THE STANDARD, NOT THE OPTION. AND EVEN FARTHER BACK, LOWER CASE WAS AN ACCIDENTAL OUTGROWTH OF THE NEED FOR SPEED…
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Another official reason
Continuing yesterday’s theme of fake official reasons…. Seen on Reddit, a former Minuteman missile operator has built a web resource to listen and track the network of messages going to missile sites. The messages are coded but the transmissions are openly audible on SHORTWAVE, 11175 KHz. According to him the network itself isn’t secret, just…
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It’s usually personal
My dad told me this back in the 60s when “communists” were the big bugaboo. When a professor is fired for communism, you can be pretty sure the real reason was personal. The dean can’t put “I don’t like him” on an official form. This applies in all areas of life, not just hiring and…
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Full moon reported
Another weird crime case. At first it sounded like a serious situation requiring lots of hardass police action. After it was over, only one thing was clear. These people enjoy fighting and enjoy using the cops and courts as weapons in their perpetual fights. Most likely the car wasn’t stolen and there was no reason…
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Newsie Pops
Thinking about Cherry Mash and Tootsie Pops along with newspapers…. Newspapers used to understand the Tootsie Pop rule, which is also the way nature works. Give the kids a hard outer shell that needs chewing to reach the sweet inside. Give the bees a dose of nectar AND a flower that takes work to penetrate.…
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Why so much British?
Random puzzlement. Why is so much of my online world British as opposed to US? The absence of other languages needs no explanation. English has been the international language of commerce and technology since around 1920. Looking at my presumably algo-selected view of Substack, it’s heavily British or Canadian as measured by spellings. This was…
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Happy 150th, Cherry Mash!
Chase Candy was founded in 1876 in St Joe, and it’s still there, still producing Cherry Mash. I loved the stuff when I was a kid, and didn’t realize it was made in a nearby and familiar place. Here’s the Chase mansion: For some reason candy is resistant to offshoring and LBOs. The Mars family…
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Deed better than word
I’m mainly praising the Spokane newspaper for staying FIRMLY AND RIGOROUSLY non-partisan. There’s apparently some turmoil in their management, reporters disliking the new boss and new nonprofit setup. I was afraid this would lead to a return of their old haughty aristocratic contempt, but so far it hasn’t. They are remaining strictly professional, Fairness Doctrine…
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Why didn’t we see these?
Recently my social media feed has presented some GOOD art by Van Gogh. Massively surprising. I’d never seen these pictures before. In school and media we were force-fed the OFFICIAL INTERPRETATIONS of his blotchy smears. I couldn’t understand the interpretations then, and I still don’t know why blotchy smears should count as art. In fact…
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Diversionary tactic
Scary headline: AI writing assistants shrink linguistic diversity and blur personal identity Alarming! We’re limiting our language! Judging by the non-paywalled abstract, the article is just dumb, not alarming. The study wasn’t looking at all human writing, it was looking at the output of people who were USING CHATGPT. Constant: When you use a machine…
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Reprint on unexpected combinations
Truth is stranger than logic! I’ve always been fascinated by the name Daniel of St Thomas Jenifer, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. I always ass-u-me-d that the of was an indicator of nobility, like French de or German von or Irish o or Scottish mac. I further ass-u-me-d there was a…
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Little pleasures
The best pleasures in life are “after all” moments. It still works after all, I have enough after all, I can still do the task after all. On Wednesday I deinstalled the air conditioner, part of annual winterizing. It’s a complicated task with a heavy lift that has to be done fast, so I focus…
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Y no salesmen?
Saw this silly headline in the reddit pro-bitcoin area: The Silent Mutiny Against the Dollar: Why 61% of Americans Are Ready for Bitcoin (And Why We Are Explaining It All Wrong). My question: Why have nearly all parts of life forgotten the basic rules of selling? It’s not new. Read the New Testament or Dale…
Polistra's Mill
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