Author: polistra
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AOL coming back to life?
AOL was the Web’s main home page for many years. I came into the web from Compuserve, and ended up inside AOL because Compuserve’s email automatically became AOL. In the last 10 years AOL seemed to be gradually fading, bought by various larger entities, with only its email still functioning. My personal email is still…
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Useful tools
Barrett discusses Lance DeHaven Smith’s “crimes against democracy” theme. Here’s a good ‘montage’ of Smith himself: Smith makes a strong point about branding. In ordinary commerce, when people get dissatisfied with a product, a competing product tries to take advantage of the dissatisfaction. In 1914 people wanted bigger cars than the Ford T at an…
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France.
This one clip mixes the Seven Second Rule and the Self-explanatory sentence in an ultimate way. France. Unfazed diners in Lyon, France, while pension protests are raging on outside byu/EtoileDuSoir inDamnthatsinteresting
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Defending the guild
BlackVault has a new FOIA find from NSA. It’s a short report for internal use, dealing with NSA’s terrorist detection abilities in the ’70s. Only a few redactions, which don’t affect the meaning. The writer sounds like a true professional trying to maintain objectivity in a situation (2002) when objectivity about terrorists was no longer…
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Interesting question
From Denyse at UD: If two snowflakes are identical, does that increase information? Play the game right, don’t look at the other answers. My definition of information is the same as a neuron’s definition. Info is a new sensory input, not fitting into current background patterns, and potentially salient. Putting it another way, info is…
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We know where the goddamn philosophers are.
I’ve often asked WHERE ARE THE GODDAMN PHILOSOPHERS? Well, it’s a dumb question. Philosophers are spokesmen for psychopaths. That’s where they are. Unsurprising: Sammy was always a criminal. Professional criminals are born, not made. More salient: When Sammy set up his criminal empire in 2018, he brought along Philosopher MacAskill to provide Gangster Ethics. MacAskill…
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WEF, not WE
Via EvolutionNews, a “philosophy” prof is worrying about the ethics of bug farming. If we’re going to farm animals that are candidates for sentience, then there should be welfare standards, says [philosophy processor Jonathan] Birch. Right now there are no widely recognized welfare guidelines for farmed insects, and few laws that specifically require insect farmers…
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Speaking of
Speaking of physically impossible goals and physically impossible all-debt “banking”, I connected these nicely in 2019. = = = = = START FUCKING REPRINT: Last month I thoroughly EXPLODED the blasphemous “green” “new” “deal”, ending with the FACT that the real purpose was the “new forms of financing”, in other words MMT. Now the purpose…
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Templargraph
I was looking for info on an interesting story told by Ripley, and ran into this instead… The Knights Templar used hawala-style full reserve banking to finance Crusades and pilgrimages. A pilgrim could leave his cash at Temple Church in London, and withdraw it in Jerusalem. Instead of carrying money, he would carry a letter…
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Parkinson corollary
Corollary of Parkinson, not quite stated in the book but easily inferred: When a leader or organization wants you to help accomplish a PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE goal, you can be sure the real purpose is hidden. Physically impossible goals are guaranteed to increase the budget and workforce forever. At every stage in the process, the leader…
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Always hoard your work.
I pulled another forgotten tool out of my pre-made Poser toolkit and saved a lot of tiresome labor. Now that I’m old and burned out by the “virus” torture, it’s nice to have the stored work of a younger and smarter ancestor on hand. AMORTIZE, AMORTIZE, AMORTIZE! ALWAYS HOARD YOUR WORK, EVEN IF YOU CAN’T…
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Maybe you shouldn’t
MindMatters has been focusing on the problems and failings of AI for a long time, sometimes missing the point and sometimes hitting it. I’ve been ‘reacting’ to their hits and misses for a long time, as a way of organizing and rationalizing my own thoughts. For some reason their host Discovery.org has a VERY SLOW…
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Not auspicious
DailyMail shows off the new postage stamps for King Charles. Each stamp has a beautiful painting of a flower, with a gray profile in the upper corner that doesn’t look much like the profile of Charles. Instead, it looks like the generic silhouette that appears in social media before you’ve uploaded your own avatar. Not…
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Diet logic
The 1874 slang dictionary I often cite has an objective chapter on Gypsy customs and language. Most British criminal slang came from Gypsies because Gypsies are the smartest criminals. This is a fact which hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. Like it or not, most Gypsies prosper by illegal means. The author treats other Gypsy…
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Convoluted hyperinverted “justice”
According to DailyMail, Trump is going to be arrested for a completely irrelevant non-crime, which is the only way actual criminals EVER get arrested. This crime is peculiarly backwards as well as irrelevant. Trump is a master blackmailer, learning the craft from Roy Cohn, the historical champion. (Second only to Lady Edgar, who had the…
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