Category: Uncategorized
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Cold revenge
Elon talked about merging Twitter into his dream of one all-consuming web system. He had tried it once before with X.com, and his holding company for Twitter was called X to make the point. When he started this particular headfake, I began to notice that Yahoo Financial is doing the best job of covering the…
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Flbossing
Earlier one of the “wags” said we should hope Elon buys Twitter and shuts it down. Now it’s clear that he’s pulling a classic LBO. Buy a company with debt, transfer the debt to the company, force it into bankruptcy to write off the debt, steal the assets. Old-fashioned LBOs generally slid under the radar…
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Worst of all anechoics
Continuing to debunk the “echo chamber” myth. Social media is the exact opposite. Lately I’ve been trying to read items in Medium, brought there by Avi Loeb’s great crowdfunded UFO project. Medium’s algorithm is the most aggressive anechoic I’ve seen. It offers you a chance to Mute an author you don’t like. Allegedly you will…
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You are playing a game you don’t understand
I’ve been disgusted but not shocked by the Official Two-Sides Game centered on bitcoin. Deepstate started playing the AP game around 2017. R favors bitcoin, D hates it. When bitcoin steals your money, you blame R because that’s where the sponsors are. Today’s crash of FTX/Binance shows a different side. Sam Bankman-Fried, who organized the…
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Flat land, flat caste
The old frontier spirit persists in the plains. Social structures are flatter, and castes matter somewhat less, in a hard land where everyone has to contribute. Today’s EnidBuzz question: What do you collect? The usual literal and cute answers were interrupted by an example of flat caste. Can you imagine Johnnie Rockefeller or Andy Carnegie…
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Checking the source 2
Two weeks ago I explored the original C++ code by ‘Satoshi’. = = = = = START REHASH: I was assuming the chain is a linked list or nodelist. It’s just a simple array, with expandable memory. The ‘chainness’ only means that each item in the array is a vector or struct including its own…
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Appreciation to apprehension
Enid is looking forward to the arrival of a supertall Xmas tree to kick off their annual lighting competition. The lighting has been going on since the 80s. When I visited Enid in those years, I often toured the well-organized neighborhood displays. When I lived there in the 70s, I might have appreciated the ‘tallest…
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Who’s more effectively paranoid?
I’m looking at two strings of comments at Substack. First Justin Hart asking for guesses about WHY the “virus” hoaxocaust needed to happen in 2020, as opposed to any other time. Second, the responses to Taibbi’s funny drinking game on last night’s “election”. I used to wonder about the WHY question, and finally settled on…
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Looks like a win-win
If stories can be believed, two late-autumn migrations have started in the bird world. The “journalists” and other D-brand demons are leaving Twitter and moving to Mastodon. The R-brand demons are moving back into Twitter. Mastodon is an obscure platform with even less general interest than Twitter. The D-brand demons will be talking solely among…
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A real economist!
This guy REALLY knows what’s happening and what’s wrong. A couple of choice items, not exactly quoted: It’s too bad that bitcoin’s marketers didn’t work for nuclear power. We can’t do anything because our government is chaotic. Nobody wants to invest in real production because you can be sure you’ll be demonized and banned two…
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Problem solved!
Our noble leaders are warning us to be VEEEEEEEEEEEERY PATIENT, because it takes a VEEEEEEEEERY LONG TIME to count votes. Obviously we need a technical fix. Polistra has a fresh Innovative Disruptive idea! We need a machine that works something like an abacus, except a whole lot faster. She realizes that this is WAY beyond…
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Eirx
We often signal our orthodoxy by using the “native” spelling of a country or tribe we’re supposedly defending. The signalers don’t worry about actual “nativity” when they invent lunacies like Latinx or Womxn. They’re trying a bit harder with Ukraine, but the result is still absurd because the Ukrainian “language” is a dialect of Russian.…
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Raking record
Time to start the roof-raking record for this winter. As always, this should be in my private daily worklog, but I started doing it here, so I’ll continue the tradition. Last winter was EASY. Only three rakings, and the first was 12/31/21. This winter is likely to be harder than average. We started with a…
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Reprint on jail and jobs
First written 11/1/17, linked in previous item, worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: An article in Aeon starts with an excellent and evocative question: Should life in jail be worse than outside, on principle? Author Chris Barker is a prof at a small POST-Christian college (Methodist) in Winfield. You don’t see…
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Parkinson, not cheating
Via UncommonDescent, suspicion falls on the work of a Nobel-winner in genetics. Several research articles co-authored by Nobel-prizewinning geneticist Gregg Semenza are being investigated by publishers after internet sleuths raised concerns about the integrity of images in the papers. Journals have already retracted, corrected or expressed concerns about 17 papers over the past decade, and…
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