Category: Uncategorized
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In medieval terms
Substack is full of booklovers and “classical education” fans. They insist that reading more books is the solution to all problems. We have forgotten how to think in complex ways because we no longer read Melville and Milton and Cicero. Exactly backwards. We read and write INFINITELY more than ever before. The web is text.…
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Today is is Proofreading Day!
My kind of day for srue. I’m a natural proofraeder and corrector, always on teh lookout for sutble errors and repepetitions. Not sardonic; editing and proofreading were always my strongest skills. I should have stuck with printing and moved into an editing career. But the official day IS sardonic. Corporate Trainer Judy Beaver created National…
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Still hammering an old point
An email today from an “independent” news source brags THE CENSORS CAN’T STOP US! Nonsense. If you were censored, you couldn’t send this email, and your podcasts wouldn’t appear ANYWHERE. PUBLISHING IS NOT CENSORSHIP. By BASIC DEFINITION, a publisher edits and selects what it will print or display, for commercial reasons. Before 2000 nobody expected…
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Poor Canada! It’s awful!
CBC features a split town, half in Quebec and half in Vermont. The library and opera house straddles the border. I remember hearing a Ripley item about the opera house, saying that the American audience clapped for the Canadian performers on stage. The building is now a library, and the border simply runs through one…
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Silly
Headline at Bloomberg: Constitutional test of Elon’s authority You don’t need a constitution to figure this out, which is fortunate since we haven’t had a constitution since 1803. A government, like a corporation, is a structured organization. Employees must take orders from the chief executive, or from managers appointed by or through the executive. Chain…
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Total puzzle
As a non-driver and non-iPhoner, I’m WAY out of the modern loop. I can’t grasp the habits and assumptions of those castes. Spokane News facebook page always posts car accidents along with fires and crimes and overdoses. Many of the readers seem to be professional drivers, Uber or similar, who are constantly in touch with…
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Not astonishing at all
Trump is NYC. Trump is Wall Street. Trump is a gangster. Those are permanent unchanging facts. Everything he does is gangster style, Roy Cohn style, Wall Street style. Everything he does enriches Wall Street and destroys real business and real humans. Latest perfect example. Trump sent Rubio to convey a gang-style blackmail note to Panama.…
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ASTONISHING!
The supremes did the right thing for goddamn once! The city of San Francisco, heartland of Gaian loonies, has been carefully following the original rules for controlling sewer outflows into the ocean. The original 1972 environmental rules are mostly good, mostly restriction of truly nasty stuff like lead and sulfur dioxide. The crazy shit came…
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I could never be a lawyer
Tried to read an account of today’s Supreme ruling on a college DEI policy. It seems to deny an appeal of a blocking of a ruling that appealed another ruling that blocked another ruling. Lawyer types on Quora understood it quickly and drew conclusions about it. I can’t begin to decipher this sort of SHITTY…
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The answer is work
This 1935 Ford promotional film starts with a long florid speech by a pompous grandiose announcer, introducing an important address by Henry Ford himself! Mr Ford will announce the company’s way of countering the Depression. After the long highly “grammatical” intro, we hear a long florid verbose oration by Henry himself: The answer is work.…
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Who’s communist?
Trump wants to disconnect our auto industry from its foreign branches and “bring it all home”. The impulse is good but the approach is fucked up as usual. Our auto makers had foreign branches FROM THE START. Ford and Buick had Canadian plants a few years after founding, and nearly all makers had Canada plus…
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Self-check for cash codgers
For many years I made grocery trips as early as possible given bus schedule and daylight. Two years ago Safeway limited the hours of real checkout, so I switched to a later storetrip to stay in the real checkout. The later schedule was inconvenient in several ways: more traffic, more crowding on bus, more delays…
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Why I like Quora part 527894
Quora specializes in personal experience stories from insiders of all sorts. Nice example just now. Question: How do lock manufacturers insure that all keys are different? Answer: They can’t. I already knew this part, just from estimating the math. There are about 10 variable points on a key. If you have 3 different heights available…
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eCurling
Canadians have developed a new ice sport called Ringette. It’s a cross between hockey and curling, with a little ring instead of a big stone or puck, and with sticks to push the rings instead of brooms. The folks in the demo here are playing on a smooth tile floor like a school gym, which…
Polistra's Mill 