Category: Uncategorized
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Input
In two of today’s brief items I made the same point without trying. Input matters more than output. This isn’t true of everything, but it’s a view we tend to skip when analyzing social, economic, and physical quantities. When we discuss “freedom” and “rights”, we concentrate on what people are saying. We neglect the equally…
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Receiving end is more interesting
Sammy has now been charged with bribing Chinese regulators along with US regulators. The giving end of this bribe is unsurprising. Sammy is a professional criminal. Everything he does is slimy. The receiving end is a bit more interesting in terms of UNNECESSARY ENTITIES. Our writers on “both” “sides” constantly emphasize that China is Communist.…
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Using the trustifying rule
Taibbi received a personal visit from an IRS agent, which is unusual. Normally the IRS sends paper letters to bill you or request corrections. Here’s a good application of my rule for trustifying. Follow personal experience. When I’ve been observing or dealing with an entity for a while, how often has the entity disagreed with…
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Soros vs Israel
Various sources are noting that the current protests in Israel are quite openly sponsored by Soros and WEF. Yuval Harari, WEF’s chief galaxybrain and an Israeli, is out front calling for revolution. I can’t parse the alleged motives of this Color Revolution. It seems to be focusing on Bibi’s attempt to get rid of his…
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On the other clutch…
I don’t want to spoil the clean outrage in previous item with a footnote. Still, there is a partial silver lining. AI gathers up and reproduces ACCEPTABLE writers and artists. AI unsees unpersons. Most fiction writers deserve to be snatched and copied, since they stopped writing original work at least 30 years ago. They’ve been…
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Smooth doubleclutch
Looks like the bitcoin game is in the mopup stage. After chipping away all the supporting players, the regulators finally went after Binance, the main engine of bitcoin. Like GM, Binance has been buying up and knocking down its competitors for many years. Time for an upshift in the killcount. The next gear is AI,…
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Bond gender
We’re confused about bonds in the same way that we’re confused about gender. A bond is a contract with a specific time interval. You buy it, let the seller use your money for a specific time, and expect a periodic rental fee from the seller. At the end of the fixed time interval you sell…
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Alt Hopper
I happened to read a little filler about the American origins of our “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Chinese” food. Familiar territory, including the development of chili on cattle drives. This got me thinking about alt history for cattle drives. Our media and movies treat the Wild West as a long period of widespread wildness. In…
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Make your own holiday day!
Today is Make Your Own Holiday Day! In keeping with multiple narrative levels, Polistra declares BE YOUR OWN BEACON DAY! = = = = = START REHASH: After seeing a picture of the Elgin Observatory and realizing the building still exists, I had to animate it. Because it’s a National Historical Landmark, there’s a document…
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CNN’s mother
CNN and Fox figured out how to pose a soap opera as “news”. Stories run for months or years without any real plot movement. Shit happens, but shit has no consequences. The characters just keep on doing more shit. CBS introduced the genre in 1949. Only a few episodes of Wendy Warren and the News…
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Leave the gangstering to gangsters.
Via Daily Mail. Aiden Pleterski, a Canadian bitcoin swindler, supposedly made the mistake of swindling the wrong people who then supposedly kidnapped and tortured him. This part of the story might be real but sounds more like a publicity stunt. Unsupposedly he was running an especially stupid Ponzi. He didn’t bother to pay back the…
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Reverting to the meanest
Trump is taking the Sucker Filter to new depths. Previously he was selecting dissatisfied working men and making them look horrible. Now he has gone back to his NYC Mafia and Roy Cohn roots. His rhetoric is designed to appeal to the most vicious criminals and blackmailers and gangsters. Normal discontented people recoil in utter…
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USA = Rodarbal
I’ve been bothered for many years by one vicious inconsistency. 1. US loves and obeys countries that have actually attacked us in one way or another. England, Germany, Japan, Israel, Saudi, China. 2. US hates countries that have never attacked us. Above all Russia, which has always tried to be our friend. We’ve been steadily…
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Better example
Random train of thought, returning to a not quite random location… Noticed that bitcoin gang leader Do Kwon was finally arrested in Montenegro. This is the least famous bit of the former Yugoslavia. The other little Balkan countries have made the news often. We started a war between Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo…
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It’s simple.
I noticed that a lawsuit by publishers against Archive.org has been decided in favor of the publishers. The web coverage of this decision is uniformly one-sided, calling it unfair and illegal. After reading the actual decision, it’s obviously correct and should be uncontroversial. There’s no question of free speech or censorship. The books in question…
Polistra's Mill 