Category: Uncategorized
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More rambling on newspapers
Recently I tried to separate out the parts of a newspaper that I really enjoyed. I decided that the fillers and the human interest pieces were the sections I always read to completion. The other stuff like national “news” was incidental. Ideally and neurally, news means actionable information, telling you how to prepare for the…
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What makes Sammy run?
Now Sammy is openly tampering with witnesses. He contacted one of the main accusers suggesting “reconnection”. Sammy is not dumb. He’s drugged up and spoiled and entitled and an incurable cheater, but I can’t see why a perpetual cheater would MAXIMIZE his own sentence. Was he planning to reveal these contacts during the trial? Witness…
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Same price 2
Last week I compared an elegant mansion in Enid and a drab two-bedroom module in Spokane, both priced at $350k. In terms of proper innate value the mansion should be 20 times the price of the module. Back in 1970 the mansion would be $200k and the module would be $10k. Here’s a higher level…
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Same line, different sides
Pithy from Kirn: If you want to distinguish your behavior from that of an AI, make it super robotic and below-average all the time. The AI right now is all hung up on seeming authentic and smart. Reminds me immediately of a much older situation where the human vs machine line was drawn along the…
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Carver quote
On Jan 5 I featured a nice bit of science and called it a birthday gift for Carver. Previously I had been celebrating his day on Jan 29, but apparently historians think it’s Jan 5 now. Well, this is Jan 29, so here’s an unfamiliar quotation from the man himself. The Quote Investigator found this…
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Took longer than they thought
American Radio Library has added more issues of Philco News. Skimming through the sequence shows the fadeout of US electronics. From 1930 to 1950, Philco was a top producer of consumer products, from radios and TVs to appliances. Philco was proud of its focus on consumers instead of shareholders. After 1950, the magazine focuses more…
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Buchanan retires
Pat Buchanan is retiring from writing. I’m joining the tributes because his columns helped to turn me away from neocon idiocy and BACK to the localist/socialist position I started with. The linked article is a career biography showing how Buchanan started inside the Deepest waters of Imperialist Deepstate under Nixon, then gradually diverged toward the…
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Accidentally marked bills
News item: Amazon warns its developers not to use ChatGPT as a search engine or problem-solver. AI learns from every conversation, which means that a conversation including trade secrets will automatically become part of what AI knows. Amazon’s counterspies have noticed some trade secrets showing up in their tests of ChatGPT. This is the inverse…
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Charlie sweeps out the trash
King Charles is starting out strong. He has literally evicted Andrew from all royal palaces and offices and titles and honors. No American politician has ever kicked out an Epstein agent, because “both” “parties” are totally owned by Epstein. All of the recent “presidents” have been openly and proudly associated with the Epstein Blackmail Factory.…
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Guilds returning?
Since 2015 I’ve been bitching about the total lack of guild spirit. Every single profession eagerly joined first the partisan inquisition of Trump, and then the “virus” NAZI TORTURE concentration camp. NOBODY tried to enforce or encourage the supposed ethics of professionalism. Now we’re seeing some scattered exceptions. The securities regulators are pursuing bitcoin scammers…
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Revolutionary design?
NASA announces with great fanfare a revolutionary method of propelling rockets. The RDRE differs from a traditional rocket engine by generating thrust using a supersonic combustion phenomenon known as a detonation. This design produces more power while using less fuel than today’s propulsion systems and has the potential to power both human landers and interplanetary…
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~π
Today isn’t Pi Day, but a couple of half-decent Pi jokes showed up today. First, from a rare ’40s radio show, one of the many with high quality music and low quality but often funny comedy. This poem was featured in Fountain of Fun from November 1942 when rationing was the hot topic. Food and…
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Tech overreach
Still exploring the strange world of pre-electric starting systems. Winton was first with a compressed air system in 1908. Pierce adopted a similar system in 1911. The Pierce was more complicated, but also described and illustrated better, so I’ll go with it here. The self-starter on the Pierce-Arrow cars consists primarily of a four-cylinder air…
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Parkinson before Parkinson
I enjoy reading books written by advertising men from pre-Deepstate times. Admen were the real social scientists. They had to do real experiments on real people with real money at stake. Their experiments were automatically limited in scope by profit. They needed living breathing working customers. Admen weren’t funded by Deepstate, so they had no…
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Bureaucratic genes and epigenes
I read and understood Parkinson 50 years ago, and haven’t yet seen any contrary evidence. In fact the real situation is vastly worse now than when he was writing. My usual question is: Given that criminal agencies and organizations CAN’T AND WON’T be deleted, how do we set up competing forces? My usual answer is…
Polistra's Mill 