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What would Proverbial think?
If the proverbial Martian picked up scenes like this while monitoring Earth TV, what would he think? People are standing and sitting bent over. Many of them are using crutches and canes and wheelchairs. If he was a proverbial evolutionist as well as a proverbial Martian, he’d automatically assume we were dropping back to quadrupedal…
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Money as delta
Both sides in the pointless battle between bitcoin and fiat are missing the biggest point. I’m also missing it most of the time, though I did hit it once or twice. I was reminded of the point by the recent amazing finding about spores. Like many actively living things, spores contain an abacus that counts…
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The Great Tradeoff?
I was surprised last month when BEVERLY HILLS blocked an attempt by Los Angeles to resume NAZI STRANGULATION TORTURE. Peasants had been protesting for three fucking years, but peasant protests only bring out the storm troopers. Protests by courtiers are meaningful and influential. Machiavelli: The worst that a prince has to expect from a hostile…
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Still true both ways
The collection of rare one-off old radio programs at Archive includes a lot of serious wisdom. Possibly those single episodes were preserved on tape or disk because of the unique wisdom, or possibly the wisdom was typical of all episodes. In the cases where the Blessed Preservers have given us a full season or a…
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Indicative vs Imperative again
The galaxy-brains are always bullies. Not necessarily full-fledged psychopaths, but always functioning as powermongers. Balaji is a classic galaxy-brain. Here he shows how to turn an admission of failure into a command. Korea and the urban parts of China are getting ready to adapt ALL of their roads and streets for self-driving cars. Balaji requires…
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Aphid Day 2022 (tentative)
Oct 8, 2022, temp 78. We’re getting a fairly good swarm today so I’ll do the reprint. In the last few years the aphids have pulled a headfake before the serious swarm, so this is tentative. The weather.com forecast agrees with the aphids that it’s all downhill from today; the NWS forecast sees a few…
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Good question
Latest from Kirn: When I was a kid, there was a huge Cold War-inspired math, science, and physical education push. It wasn’t quite my bag but it made a lot of sense and quite possibly paid off in many ways. Why is there not one now? I don’t get it. I’ve been grinding on the…
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VR = Casino
An article at Coindesk points to a jarring dissonance in numbers. A metaverse project called Decentraland has an average of 38 users each day. (Defined as people who log in, not just momentary views.) Decentraland has a stock “value” of $1.3 billion, meaning that idiot venture capitalists have used it as a toilet to throw…
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Weird political ads
I’ve been getting more political spam from D than R lately, but the two are interchangeable. Neither side EVER offers to solve any problems or do any work. Most of the emails are expressing desperation. “I’m getting stressed out!” “I’m almost done.” “I’ve had it.” “We’re devastated!” “Tearing up while writing this email.” If you…
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Wasted imagination
Inside the convoluted world of bitcoin scams, a lot of super-smart nerds are working hard, probably for very little pay, to develop ever-denser convolutions. Here’s one sample found on Medium. There are HUNDREDS of projects like this, each with its own purposeless purpose, always ENABLING USER to do something that no actual human could ever…
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Two solvers
We have exactly two problem-solvers in the world of politics and power. All the rest are demonic problem-generators or passive helpers for the demons. The first problem-solver is DeSantis in Florida. He is clearly following FDR’s model. Ignore ideology, forget standard sayings and standard tactics. Just fix what’s broken. He’s also explaining his actions clearly…
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Wow! Wow! and Wow again!!!!!!
A perfectly GIANT contribution to our knowledge of the world! Bacterial spores have an extraordinary ability to evaluate their surrounding environment while remaining in a physiologically dead state. They found that spores use stored electrochemical energy, acting like a capacitor, to determine whether conditions are suitable for a return to normal functioning life. Spores were…
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Tired of this
I’m lethally tired of conservatives who haven’t been paying attention for the last 50 years. They’re still saying the same two or three Official Conservative Quotes, most of which were wrong from the fucking start even before they turned stale. Here’s a good example from a respondent in one of Kirn’s twitter threads. (Kirn himself…
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Proper use of science
Here’s a nice example of Carverian science. Constant: Everyone knows that the mind shifts mode after age 40. Millions of words have been written about this change for thousands of years. We sometimes call it the midlife crisis, but most folks realize it’s not a crisis, just a change in our way of perceiving the…
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Smart observation by Taibbi
Taibbi is discussing the downfall of journalism in a simple practical way. When CNN decided to run 24-hour news, quality switched to quantity. Definitely true. But Taibbi started in the industry after the Fairness Doctrine was already gone. Revoking the Doctrine opened the way to transform news into soap opera, and the increased quantity of…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 