Author: polistra
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Probably a healthy tendency
Looking at Substack after a pause, I notice several teapot tempests about accusations of Controlled Opposition. The accused APs are stoutly defending their veracity, which doesn’t help. I think it’s a good sign when people are sniffing the unmistakable AP smell. An influencer who argues persistently and expertly for one side of the wrong question…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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Why sane people avoid IOT
This is why sane people avoid ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘smart’ appliances. Thousands of Colorado residents were locked out of adjusting their thermostats on a 90 degree summer day. The thermostats read “energy emergency” and customers had no way of moving the temperature down. Energy company Xcel had placed a temporary lock on some smart…
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Back to Kirn Quibbles…
Kirn’s latest pithy: The forces of adamant top-down control & the forces of creative distributed responsibility both feel that they now have an opportunity in technology to manifest long-held dreams. So they’re fighting. Nope. Wrong three ways. First: Distributed responsibility is NOT creative. Strong cultures don’t need a lot of top-down control because they’re bound…
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Somebody else gets it!
The bitcoin enterprise was developed BY Deepstate FOR Deepstate. This was obvious from the fucking start, and I’ve been shouting about it for 10 years. Bitcoin is CENTRALIZED BY FUCKING DEFINITION. When all transactions MUST take place inside NSA’s web, all transactions are CENTRALIZED IN THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY. You can’t possibly call this decentralized…
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Fake question
Saagar and Krystal are giving us fake solutions to the fake problem of “dark money” in politics. I didn’t bother to watch. OCKHAM. This is a fake argument designed to focus our attention on the wrong question. We have to recognize the difference between Profit and Share Value. In earlier decades, local and state elections…
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The last influencer
Thanks to the central banks finally turning off the counterfeit waterfall, the bitcoin and NFT tower of lunacy has just about finished imploding. Nearly everything in the realm has been “hacked” by its founders or “accidentally” crashed by a “glitch” or “paused” to allow the founders to abscond safely. Now that the Correct Persons have…
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Stubblefield, fields of stubble
Reading Frank Edwards’s career biography, the story of his 40 years in radio. As in his other books and features, he takes frequent informative and entertaining detours, always focusing on the class struggle and favoring the underdog. He tells the story of Nathan Stubblefield, the unquestioned inventor of wireless voice and music transmission in 1885.…
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Carver wins again
Another victory for Carverian science. When you look more closely at a totally familiar object that couldn’t possibly be important, you sometimes realize it’s hugely important. Most cells have cilia, and many cells have one primary cilium. Bacteria and other microbes use this primary cilium to get around, but it was ‘obviously’ vestigial for cells…
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Special yup
An article at Brownstone hits all the right points about the “virus”, in the usual overly cautious Brownstone way. I want to single it out for special kudos because FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE a commentator grasped the basic truth about colleges: In some past golden age, we like to think that university…
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Yup
We’ve had a sudden burst of wildfires on the west side of Spokane in the last few weeks. These particular fires are not starting at windy times, they’re not near railroads or farm machinery, they’re not at tramp camps. The pattern tends to suggest an arsonist, and now an arsonist has been spotted in the…
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Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as…
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Speaking of extra senses….
Denyse at MindMatters cites a fascinating new study on plant intelligence. TL-DR: Climbing bean plants can sense where a vertical pole is without having to feel around. No trial and error, no obvious negative feedback. The tendrils just drive straight toward the nearest vertical thing. The researchers are trying to use this as evidence of…
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Useful discussion
This is an interesting and valuable discussion between a Russian who now lives in America, and an American who now lives in Russia. They compare experiences and preconceptions. Unsurprisingly, they conclude that Russians have always been more realistic than Americans. Russians (along with most old and deep cultures) haven’t been infected by the idiotic lies…
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More Foy
Continuing on automation vs skills. An old-fashioned union could effectively solve the problem of AI taking over from artists. Union shops place a union label (sometimes called a bug) on publications and products. Bugs are much less common in recent decades, but you can still see them on some products, and they are useful information…
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