Category: Uncategorized
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Dream about intellectual humility
Unusual dream this morning about intellectual humility. In the dream I had a conversation with Prevost and found him to be impressive. Message is clear! At first I found him impressive, then immediately dismissed him when he went along with Gaia. I should be less perfectionist, recognize a leader who is mostly doing the RIGHT…
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Goddamnit.
I’m way past tired of partisan mindless fucks. If you can’t do any better than pasting DNC talking points or RNC talking points or Activist Group A talking points or Activist Group B talking points or the same old misquotes from the same old Ben Franklin and CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, GO AWAY AND…
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Misses part of the history
Interesting article about Craigslist and its effect on newspapers. Craigslist is generally credited for taking the important classified ad business from papers. The article gives an insight into the founding principles of Craigslist. But the article misses the earlier part of the decline. Craiglist was simply an online replacement for free Shopper’s Edge and similar…
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Must be end of the month
How do you know it’s the end of a month? Aside from the increase in drug overdoses when the EBT cards are issued, the most reliable online signal is Substack screwing up its UI. Normally they mess with the CSS formatting so the page looks random and impossible to read. This time they left the…
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Real opposition?
If it’s real, this could be the first real crackdown on the Tech Tyrants by the Trump admin. It’s aimed at a sneaky trick by Amazon and other America-hating corporations to get around customs and tariffs. The ‘de minimis’ exception was made a long time ago to assist ordinary tourists who wanted to bring home…
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Idiotic
Substack is now following Facebook’s idiotic practice of keeping the SAME item on top of your feed for days at a time. The SAME item is never something you want, never something you actually read, and it’s usually stupid and pointless. Newspapers didn’t follow this rule. When a story was continuous, with new events each…
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Tired of the missed point.
A long time ago I got tired of people who miss the point of AI. You simply can’t argue or worry about the qualities and actions of the MACHINE. There’s no line between ChatGPT and the endless history of predictive math. Life is infinitely full of predictive mechanisms. Most plants and animals predict daylight, moons…
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Subscriber vs advertiser
Nice example of the difference between subscriber-driven and advertiser-driven media. When a business is focused on customers, it wants FEEDBACK from the customers. Collectible Auto has been pure subscriber since 1985. They often fix a problem when enough readers dislike a new feature, or dislike the deletion of an old feature. They listen to serious…
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Trump is a normal US president.
Canadians are working together to develop a newly designed nation. They’re doing it both officially and personally. It’s a fine thing to watch. MANY countries have been forced to develop their own best skills when we blockaded them. We pulled the same nasty trick on Cuba in 1960, Persia in 1980, and Russia in 2000.…
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Almost sounded good
Normally I skip the Youtube ads for gimmicks like perpetual motion machines. Ended up listening to one when it interrupted a clip I was using as background noise while eating. This one was a miniature air conditioner. The action is unquestionably interesting. Instead of compressing and expanding Freon in a closed set of pipes, it…
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Priority list
If governments want people to listen to crap about “climate” and “diversity” and “zoning”, they will have to do ONE THING first. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control crime. Control…
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Thanks, weather gods.
Just exercising gratitude. Last year we got too much heat. This year is a strictly average summer (so far). Mostly 80s, some scattered 90s, couple of 100s. Only a couple of storms, versus LOTS of storms last year.
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Not the only choices
Paul Vigna proposes frequent debt jubilees. He says there are only two motivations in an economy: greed and morality. He complains correctly that we’ve organized our economy on greed and debt. To favor morality more, he wants occasional debt jubilees, saying that ancient governments realized it was the best way of restoring stability and giving…
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More non-news from “news”
I keep watching to see if any of the powerful institutions have figured out what’s wrong. So far I’m not seeing any understanding here in US. Mexico and Canada have OFFICIALLY figured it out and started doing the right thing, which is the FDR thing. Will we ever get there? I suppose it’s possible. Until…
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X et XII, pars I de II
Discussions and school lessons on Roman arithmetic are solely about integers. In reality the Romans, and the medieval merchants who continued the tradition, handled fractions all the time using a sophisticated notation. Integers operated on a pair of 5s, not a simple base 10. Fractions operated on a pair of 6s, not a simple base…
Polistra's Mill 