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Growing and shrinking /r/
BBC has an article on dialect change. Final /r/, which has been absent from The King’s English for many centuries, persisted in isolated areas. Now it’s disappearing in the isolated areas as well. = = = = = START QUOTE: Accent change is often like a puddle: it dries up in most places and leaves…
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The basic question
Now ordinary people are free to say that the “virus” panic was a fraud. I’m sure many of them recognized it all along, but kept quiet to survive. Silence is rational when noise is useless. Even the executives who participated in the torture are backing away slowly, blaming and framing others as usual. Our executives…
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Illiterate as usual
Pointlessly browsing through the increasingly Twitterized landscape of Substack, ran across an article by Douglas Rushkoff discussing the REAL media analyzers, Jerry Mander and Neal Postman. Rushkoff was interviewing a fellow Media Literacy prof about how they train people to look critically at media. I had to subscribe to get the podcast, so I paid…
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Why does Toyota have quality?
Since I’ve been discussing Toyota vs GM, today’s news is appropriate. Toyota bought Daihatsu some time ago. Daihatsu is their low-end brand, mainly for domestic sales. Recently the Japanese government caught Daihatsu cheating on emission tests. What would GM do? GM would lobby the government to change the standards, and would probably succeed. What did…
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A lawsuit that might matter
The NYTimes is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for stealing its work. Unlike some other suits, this one might get traction. Judges religiously believe and infinitely value everything spewed by NYTimes, so they will be inclined to support the suit. = = = = = Later, Jonathan Bartlett at MindMatters has a different take on this…
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So far no fakery
RFK sounds like a populist. He even agrees with FDR in many ways. I was suspicious of him from the start because he was using the massive crime of the “virus” holocaust to push environmentalism. He was steering the activists away from the real crime of the lockdowns and muzzles and panic, toward the OCD…
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The Tocqueville shared lie
Linked in previous, worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Listening to a second-string Repooflican radio talker. He’s running the same old tape about The Forty-Seven Percent, the same old line about Voting Largesse From The Public Treasury. He’s saying that Obama is guaranteeing perpetual D majorities by offering lots of free…
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Another shared lie
In 1948 a Chevy sales film mentioned Volkswagen as an icon of Hitler. Twenty years later the actual car was the enemy in this 1973 film aimed at GM factory workers. It cites the losses in various other industries. Textiles were mostly gone. Home radios and TVs were all gone. 20% of autos were foreign.…
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Da yoots has got it right.
The Progressive Policy Institute (Will Marshall’s outfit) surveyed young working class folks. If the poll is valid, it shows a remarkably accurate understanding, despite all the toxins spewed by R and D media for decades. These people want Democrats to be like FDR and want Repooflicans to be like Ike. A couple of specific questions:…
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Let’s do both!
The Dems have been removing Trump from ballots. Now the Texas lieutenant governor is playing footsie by asking to remove Biden from ballots. DO BOTH!!!!! Ideal solution! Then the dozen COMPETENT candidates could have a real election.
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What we assume
Most of what we semiconsciously assume about the past is wrong. We assume that electric power must have come before telegraphs and telephones and radio, because all of those systems need electricity. In reality the grid started long after telegraphs and slightly after telephones, and wasn’t really complete until the 1950s. We also assume that…
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Why lawyers?
Thinking about those lawyers who write on Quora. Why do I appreciate them? Because they’re OBJECTIVE. Other professions sometimes write ‘out of character’, but other professions never manage the same degree of objectivity. Academics never bash tenure outside the ivied walls**. Politicians never reveal real secrets. Journalists never tell the truth about the permanent idiocy…
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Never thought I’d say this…
Quora is a better reading experience than Substack now. Quora hasn’t changed. It’s still a few interesting writers (mostly lawyers!) and a jungle of pointless bot-questions about math and IQ. The pointless bots are easy to spot and ignore. The interesting writers don’t feel obligated to join meaningless disputes. Substack has changed since it introduced…
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Maico Chromalyzer continued
A few days ago I noted with amazement an old spectrogram displayer that was used for training deaf speech. The Maico Chromalyzer was made in 1954 but probably didn’t gain much success. I couldn’t resist modeling and animating it, using my guess about its innards. This version shows 5 horizontal bulbs, each responding to a bandpass filter.…
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First real micronuke!
Via MSN, a new microreactor developed by Westinghouse is being actually installed in Saskatchewan. Supposedly it will go online in 2029, which is still way too slow but better than the INFINITE amount of time taken by other vaporware reactors in this fucked part of the world. This one is truly micro, powering only a…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 