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Shannon!
Now there’s some real Shannon info, a narrative that I had never thought about or guessed before. Toward the end Ryan is saying that every president since 1963 has known CIA was involved in killing JFK, and every president has continued to cooperate in hiding the info. Ryan makes the connection, which is obvious after…
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Boutique advantage
At the moment, text-generating AI does a nearly perfect job of expressing views that can be found via Google and Wikipedia. I’ve seen some attempts to generate “opposition” views, and they always miss the mark in the same way that Youtube’s Suggested misses the mark. Suggested has picked up the fact that I like old…
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Why does this myth persist?
One of the fact-gatherers is coming to terms with reality, but not quite there yet. As citizens, concerned citizens, we engage in debate not to hear ourselves talk, but to convince others of the truth of what we claim. What is supposed to happen, in a debate, ideally speaking, is that the person who makes…
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Terse
From Reddit: a simple and terse and elegant description of the entire blockchain enterprise. Would taking crypto out of your “product” change the product any more than taking the stone out of the stone soup? Says it all. = = = = = The same model applies to our fake emergencies and panics as well…
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Now I get it. Maybe.
Elon is leaving Twitter, “letting” the people “make the decision” for him. Now the whole thing makes sense, sort of. Back in April he made an offer purely for noise and publicity, certain that Twitter would never take him up on it. Twitter’s big shareholders, perhaps understanding Elon or perhaps for their own cold-hearted reasons,…
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Real Shannon
I think I’ve written this before, but I feel like doing it again. The sudden switch from free money to tight money, Share Value to profit, QE to QT, must have been a genuine Shannon event. Fully unexpected, not telegraphed or predictable in advance. It caught lots of corporations and Experts and Influencers off guard,…
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Works wonders
Via Reuters: After two days in a real Bahamas jail, Sammy has decided to let US extradite him. Jail works wonders on spoiled brats. A real threat of punishment also works wonders on young professional criminals like Sammy who are accustomed to bullying and cheating through all obstacles. Reminds me of my experience on the…
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Seeing the whole graph
A brief feature on Yahoo Finance shows that the new “alarming” trend toward youngsters staying with parents is not alarming at all. A screencap of the relevant graph: This shows the percent of younger folks 18-29 who are living with parents. The underlying article at Business Insider links to Census data, but the Census website…
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Fill the reader or fulfill the writer?
Both sides are sticking to the peculiar Shared Lie that newspapers are supposed to “hold power accountable” or “speak truth to power”. The two sides have different party-based definitions of which truth and which power, but they’re both essentially wrong. Newspapers were ALWAYS working for one party or for the owner’s business interests. Newspapers are…
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Data web returns to data web
The “rights” fans are getting all excited over the non-revealing “revelation” that FBI controls media. Time for a reprint from April of this year. = = = = = START REPRINT: Secrecy and censorship are the defaults. We don’t have the choice of escaping censorship. Given this CONSTANT, there are two interesting VARIABLES, a political…
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Nice exception
One of the neighbors always puts up a complex light and sound Xmas display. As I walked past it yesterday it was chiming Rudolph. I’m always bitching about the cruel jokes of Cinderella and Ugly Duckling. Attractive people bamboozle unpopular people into wasting their lives in futile pursuit of unachievable goals. Rudolph is an admirable…
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Metashannon
Still Shannon-watching, following the latest from Bari Weiss and crew. Still not seeing anything genuinely new or unguessable in the material they’ve dug up so far. Reviewing from previous item: In pre-web terms, Twitter is a magazine like the New Yorker. It’s not a newspaper or a broadcaster. Facebook is more like radio or TV,…
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Clicking for anger isn’t new
We believe that the use of disgust and anger to create ‘engagement’ is new. It’s not. These polls from a 1946 book about radio and advertising surprised me. First an unsurprising poll on general attitudes: Radio was slightly more favorable than newspapers, and local government was lowest on the approval scale. Another unsurprise: The Fairness…
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You can do better
UncommonDescent’s take on the Lawrence Livermore fusion advance: Could fusion energy be God’s design for supplying humanity’s energy needs in a future era? Come on, you can do better than that. The fusion-powered SUN is God’s design for supplying energy to life. We still haven’t turned fusion into a practical and controllable energy source, and…
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Science and sausage
As usual I was reading some article by some “independent” who naively assumes that science actually proceeds by questioning. First thought: As usual I was thinking about the peculiar disconnect between the public myth of science and the reality of science. Anyone who has worked in research for a while realizes that self-censorship is automatic…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 