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WPA 2.0 in Carver territory
Here’s a fine example of the WPA spirit. Business has abandoned a normal and necessary function, so government picks it up. Even more WPAish, it’s a county government, not the feds. WPA gave priority to local control and local tradition, with federal support when needed. A 150-year-old weekly in Tuskegee was failing like most papers.…
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QA done.
Finished doing the testing and QA on the latest version of courseware, two months before the deadline. The previous edition in 2018 was hasty with too many shortcuts. This year I’ve made a vow to balance out the universal Engagement and Enshitification with careful work. For the newer chapters I’ve added more value with texts…
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Here’s the real misinfo
Social platforms are constantly censoring “misinformation” and “disinformation”, two fancy names for heresy. They DON’T censor genuine fakery, some clearly illegal, in their ADS. Been seeing this one on various sites. Anyone with sense will know this isn’t the Social Security Administration. Unfortunately many old folks are either naive or mentally fading, and won’t know…
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Naive?
Polls missed again and they’re pretending to reform again. They didn’t see that Zohran could win. In the big picture polls don’t really matter much. The “election” matters to some extent, at least until Deepstate finds a way to overturn it or blackmail the rebel into submission. Or until the rebel turns out to be…
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Beating a dead bear
Or a dead whale. RFK is running true to form, and his cultists are running with him as always. After Pied Pipering the “conservatives” into the Gaian fold by preaching anti-vax, he’s now advocating that everyone should wear Deepstate monitors all the time. Hmm. That’s odd. I thought vax was supposedly bad because mRNA is…
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Worse than “terrorists”
Via Spokane News facebook. Asshole was arrested for setting fires on the roadside. He’s been arrested 17 times before, often for the same crime. At least he wasn’t released IMMEDIATELY; he was kept in jail on $5000 bail. He’ll be out in a few days instead of a few minutes. Arsonists should be punished MORE…
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First original idea
NYC’s next mayor Zohran has one original idea. This is a landmark! No US politician at any level or any party has shown originality since 1945. All politicians copy-paste the same shit in different dialects. His idea: NYC should run municipal grocery stores. This is what the New Deal did in other areas. The principle…
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Not any worse
Reading tech history and medieval history in the last decade has been highly satisfying and informative. Old tech journals tell you what was happening in society if you know the jargon and know how to read between the lines. The newer medieval historians are actually DOING THEIR JOB, telling us in clear language how ordinary…
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Farm focus to the next level
Many stations in rural states focused on farming. WIBW in Topeka, my nighttime companion in the 50s, devoted most of its mornings to agriculture and timeshared the frequency with KSAC, the all-ag station at K-State. WEKZ in Monroe, Wisconsin took farm focus to a new level. They owned and operated a farm right next to…
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Why licensing is crucial
Recently I wrote a defense of licensing, from medieval practices to modern authorship and occupation licensing. Here’s why licensing is needed. A judge has made a completely unusable and pointless decision on AI theft. Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset and “forever” library but that training…
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Medieval // REM
Not especially relevant, and I’ve said it before in a different context. When programmers add comments to code, we think we’re doing something new and modern. Here’s a piece of my C++ code from Audin, my all-purpose courseware engine. The active parts are on the left, and my explanations and reminders are on the right.…
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Pope gets it.
The old joke: Is the Pope Christian? was supposed to be a self-evident tautology. For too many years the pope was not a Christian. Now it’s a tautology again. From Prevost: = = = = = START QUOTE: Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility to stop the tragedy of war before…
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Reprint plus encouraging news
Linked in previous, worth a reprint as a more general look at currencies and standards. = = = = = START 2024 REPRINT: An 1880s British book on banking gave a simple statistic that altered my view of how money works. The statistic: Earlier I summarized an American book from the same era, which I…
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Cursed weight, sacred weight, part 2 of 2
= = = = = MEDIEVAL METROLOGY PART 4 = = = = = Why has gold been a standard** for so many centuries? Partly because it’s a suitable standard in a metrology sense. It doesn’t mix easily with other elements, it doesn’t degrade with time, and it can be purified and verified. But metrology…
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One more inevitability
Previous item is a perfect example of why the RIGHT kind of price controls are needed. Enid hasn’t been affected by the real estate bubble. When I compare rental and sale prices there with what I remember from the 70s, the current numbers are in line with overall inflation. A $100 apartment then is $700…
Polistra's Mill
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Polistra's Mill 