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Hits all the nails
Rushfield hits ALL the nails on the head in one massive all-consuming all-explaining sentence. He’s talking about the entertainment industry’s death rattle, specifically the strike shutdown. = = = = = START QUOTE: There are a lot of people who were squeezed out of the profession and the city by the shutdown, who will never…
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Speaking of metrology…
Speaking of metrology, here’s a cute use of measurement. From now on we'd like everyone to report their snow measurements in units of corgis😉 https://t.co/7A8HlPnKKZ — NWS Spokane (@NWSSpokane) December 11, 2023
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Victory over VE
WW2 ended precisely and meaningfully with VE and VJ day. Deepstate swore NEVER AGAIN to let a war end. From then on, all wars would continue forever, and the agencies and budgets needed to conduct the wars would go on forever. Korea wasn’t meant to end. Ike ended the active part and left our soldiers…
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Misdirected
Big Entertainment is fading. The tech tyrants who bought it know it’s fading. They’re happy to let it fade. That’s why they bought it. LBO. The Hollywood unions acquired solid contracts from the dying dinosaur, but the contracts don’t mean much. The contracts will help the dinosaur to fade, and the tech tyrants will be…
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What’s a door for?
We’re seeing another burst of intentional misunderstanding by economists. This particular idiocy has been going on since the 90s. Economists say that “the economy” is performing beautifully. All of their numbers are going in the correct direction. The Dow is going up to the moon. Bitcoin is going up to the moon. Bezos is flying…
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Hoel’s insight
Now that the OpenAI soap opera has turned out to be solely a Microsoft soap opera, Erik Hoel writes a rigorous economic discussion of the true potential of AI. He reaches two parallel conclusions: (1) The jobs that AI can replace are low-wage jobs or ‘open-source’ jobs like editing Wikipedia or writing drab repetitive music.…
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All themes at once!
Just for fun, here’s a news item that fits all of my current themes at the same time. = = = = = START QUOTE: A northern Minnesota electric cooperative is going after a couple for their alleged plot to siphon hundreds of thousands dollars’ worth of energy for two bitcoin farms. The civil suit…
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Development directions
Completely random and irrelevant thought, stirred by a good sleep. I was pondering the tendency of towns to develop in only one direction. Sometimes the direction is forced by geography like a lake or mountain. When it’s not forced, the reasons are harder to figure out. Ponca and Manhattan both developed in one direction. In…
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REA was Stroybank
Was the New Deal “Soviet”? Yes, in the best sense of the word. FDR tried to adopt parts of the Soviet system because suffering Americans recognized that the Soviet system worked better than ours. The best way to prevent a revolution is to treat the radicals as a corrective signal. Pull the system in the…
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Only the innocent
Here’s a new thought. Start with two of my tiresomely repeated themes. First: Secrecy is the default. The job of language is to maintain secrets. Every module, from cell to organism to family to tribe to guild to corporation to nation, has a set of private SKILLS and FACTS. Language develops to communicate these private…
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Nature’s electrotyping
Pointed by Denyse as always, an interesting speculation about horizontal gene transfer. The researchers are NOT saying this process happens in Nature, only that an experiment shows it CAN happen. = = = = = START QUOTE: Electroporation uses an electric field to create temporary pores in the cell membrane. This lets molecules, like DNA…
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Jefferiad
Jeffrey Tucker writes a proper jeremiad. (Jefferiad?) = = = = = START QUOTE: Such “public health” measures were not even within the range of possibility outside the worst dystopian fiction. And yet it all happened in a flash, all with the assurance that The Science demanded it. None of the institutions on which we…
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More Thiel Questions
Thiel Questions are arguments or views that others don’t share. The last time I updated them was more than a year ago. Time to add a few more. I’ve written about each of these before but didn’t treat them as Thiel. = = = = = (1) Standard “history” tells us that we didn’t offshore…
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Today is Shareware Day!
Today is Shareware Day! Surprised they still mark the day. Shareware was a BIG DEAL for a decade, from 2000 to 2010. Now it’s mostly gone. Where did all the Hundred Flowers go? Gone to Deepstate every one. Like all fake “counterculture” movements, shareware became an integral part of Deepstate. Shareware turned into subscription software,…
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Raw materials
Linked in previous, worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Want to break the “cycle of violence”? Break the media. The press has been running this routine for at least a hundred years. It’s not mysterious or “unintended”. It’s an intrinsic part of their business model. Blood sells newspapers. Blood and chaos…
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