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Spoiled brats
“Journalists” are worried about Google’s new chatbot. = = = = = START BRAT: The consequences for the internet as we know it will be profound. For news publishers, they have already been profound. Industry executives are quietly sounding the alarm about “Google Zero,” a term popularized by The Verge’s Nilay Patel to describe the…
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Personal schadenfreude
Via Gizmodo. Chegg, the company that offered a variety of online courses and homework cheats, rose to a fine Tech Tyrant peak of Holy Share Value during the Bush-Trump concentration camp. Investors are cheaters, so they love a cheating technology. Since then, the Tech Tyrants moved on to the superior cheating and stealing of AI,…
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Static vs dynamic abundance
Abundance is presently the subject of some heeeaaaavvvvvy discussions among the intellectuals. I don’t know what they mean by it and don’t really need to know. Pinheads dancing on angels. In reality, a feeling of abundance lets people relax, lets things remain abundant. When we feel a scarcity we rush to grab the last one,…
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Who? How?
Who benefits from ruining the police and prosecutors? Who benefits from rampant crime and homelessness, destroying the stability and security of civilization? Easy answer, because we know exactly who is doing it. George Soros. How does he benefit? That’s more of a mystery. When he destroyed other countries in the 80s and 90s, he gained…
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Only looks like magic
Seen in a meme: People who speak two languages have a special magic. Bilingualism looks magic to those of us who have been raised in a prescriptive system with only one way of doing things. Most people in most countries in most time periods naturally speak two or three languages, function in two or three…
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Big things don’t hit the news.
Reading some railroad-related items on Quora. Three years ago, a Canadian insider mentioned that Canadian Pacific was about ready to buy Kansas City Southern, forming the first complete north-south railroad across all of the continent. Sure enough, the merger was completed in 2023 and fully running this year. This is BIG news for both countries…
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Speaking of scammers….
Speaking of scammers and reputations: Yesterday Canadian authorities caught a major swindler named Gareth West. He posed as an Andrew Tate style extreme sportsman and bodybuilder. He pretended to get rich from flipping properties and made videos showing people how to flip. He did buy lots of real estate but didn’t flip it. He lived…
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How to beat a lottery
NewScientist has an interesting bit of mathy history about beating a lottery. It takes a lot of work and usually some inside help to buy all the tickets and guarantee a win. Success also needs careless design of the lottery itself. The article lists three times when gangs succeeded, at least partly. The first was…
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More Foy Rebellion
Another small indication of the Foy Rebellion, the return to analog. During the Bush-Trump “virus” holocaust, young folks lost their connection to life for an irreplaceable two years. They turned to digital media like dating apps, but eventually found that digital can’t replace face to face. Now they’re returning to clubs and real dates, and…
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Three categories
Substack has degraded and simplified into three categories. 1. Branch office of MSNBC 2. CS Lewis quotes 3. “If you don’t read a thousand heavy books per year, you’re an illiterate subhuman retard.” Category 1 is intended to win. The management is pouring their subsidies and rewards into the MSNBC branch office. After purification, they…
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Newspapers were snacks
Via Nieman: A media company in Belgium is trying a weird radical sci-fi method to attract PAID readers under age 65. The media company clearly finds this weird approach distasteful but feels it’s needed if they want to survive. = = = = = START QUOTE: Mediahuis carried out qualitative research to find out what…
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Never stopped to think…
I’ve been reciting the alphabet since I was 3, but never looked at the pattern of the official syllables. There’s a fairly consistent logic. All stops come before a vowel, most liquids and some fricatives come after a vowel. H is an odd exception. If it’s considered a fricative, it should be He. If a…
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Another first/second thought
Since I’m doing first thought/second thought today… Somebody posted that the internet makes fraud easier. First thought: On average it’s not easier. A proper swindle starts with cultivation and ends with disappearance. The net makes disappearing super easy, but makes cultivating a lot harder. Persuasion, for an honest or dishonest purpose, works best face to…
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Upon whom shall Newton’s apple drop?
For many years schools taught prescriptive grammar, while real linguists and dictionaries had long since switched to descriptive grammar. The dispute finally went away in the 70s. Only conservatives and neocons are still pushing the prescriptive crap. None of the prescriptive crap made the slightest sense. The prescribers weren’t real authors, just various scholars who…
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Leaps
Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the ’50s brought China up to where we were in 1930. Xi’s Great Leap Forward in the ’80s brought China up to where we WOULD HAVE BEEN IN 2025. China has been moving forward normally in the last 50 years and we’ve been moving backward. Nothing is better than 1975,…
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