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Tech overreach
Still exploring the strange world of pre-electric starting systems. Winton was first with a compressed air system in 1908. Pierce adopted a similar system in 1911. The Pierce was more complicated, but also described and illustrated better, so I’ll go with it here. The self-starter on the Pierce-Arrow cars consists primarily of a four-cylinder air […]
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Parkinson before Parkinson
I enjoy reading books written by advertising men from pre-Deepstate times. Admen were the real social scientists. They had to do real experiments on real people with real money at stake. Their experiments were automatically limited in scope by profit. They needed living breathing working customers. Admen weren’t funded by Deepstate, so they had no […]
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Bureaucratic genes and epigenes
I read and understood Parkinson 50 years ago, and haven’t yet seen any contrary evidence. In fact the real situation is vastly worse now than when he was writing. My usual question is: Given that criminal agencies and organizations CAN’T AND WON’T be deleted, how do we set up competing forces? My usual answer is […]
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Y no strikes?
Reddit pointed to this important article on the Final Victory of the financial sector over the real economy. = = = = = START QUOTE: The financialisation of households is an important overlooked missing piece of the declining strike activity ‘puzzle’. The term ‘financialisation’ broadly describes the increasing dependence of nonfinancial actors on financial institutions […]
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The one time we broke Parkinson
Demonic bureaucracies can’t be “reformed” or “investigated”. They must be deleted. Back in 2016 I was trying to figure out how Wilson’s demonic bureaucracies were removed. His US Food Administration and US Shipping Board controlled a large section of the economy in a precise way that sounds mighty familiar now, with good old Phases and […]
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Be careful what you wish for
When RFK jr started organizing around the vaccines, I was instantly suspicious. As I repeated endlessly, vax is a proper part of public health, while strangulation and imprisonment are proper parts of war and crime and mass murder. When you see a Good Part / Bad Part separation, it means the Bad Part is going […]
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Same price
This house in Enid was featured in a real estate ad in EnidBuzz: Elegant old mansion in an elegant part of town. Zillow showed a house in my part of Spokane for exactly the same price: Default FHA module from the late ’40s, in a drab working-class neighborhood. What’s the exact same price? $350k. Well […]
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The open source spirit
Halfway related to skill as copyright and secret. One of my perpetual Why So Late questions is electric starting for cars. Electric cars came before gas cars, and several of the early makers had both types at once. Studebaker electrified its buggy in 1902, then bought the Garford company in 1904 to join the gas […]
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Attics
Random stupid thought. Many of the podcasters I see on Youtube are in attic rooms. Slanted roof, low walls, visible dormers. This makes sense if you own a big house and want to set up a room solely for podcasting, outside of everyday traffic. But the typical McMansion also has unused basement rooms. Why don’t […]
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The techtonic plates are shifting.
This is REFRESHING. The CEO of Chegg is interviewed at Davos. He strongly emphasizes the need for JOB-BASED TRAINING. Less classroom, less university, less credentialism, more HANDS and SKILLS. I had to look up Chegg. It’s in the same business I’m in, courseware and study aids. Seems to be mainly general subject tutoring, not specific […]
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There must be a reason….
An observation on the peculiarities of social media algorithms. I wanted to write a couple of uncontroversial comments on Reddit, answering a linguistic question and a snow-shoveling question. I knew the answers to both, and the correct answers hadn’t appeared yet. So I signed in using Google as a ‘mediator’ and supplied both answers. After […]
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Before Bloomberg
Before Bloomberg LBO’d all cities into brainless rubble, city governments were a hub of mechanical invention and innovation. Power plants and streetcar lines were municipal. City street departments had clever mechanics who were free to build devices that served their customers. Local example: Back in the ’60s, Spokane’s street department invented a hydraulic gate that […]
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Launderette 2
Following from previous item, because the story is sort of local. The bank in Farmington was a ‘family office’ for local prosperous farmers. It was bought in the 1990s by a Hong Kong millionaire who might have been using it for money laundering; we don’t know that part of the story. We do know that […]
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Rall and secrecy
Ted Rall is a partisan idiot, reliably supporting DNC while pretending to be “independent”. In this column Rall makes a correct point for the wrong partisan reasons. Rall’s point: 100% of government secrecy is unneeded and irrelevant. All the secrets of government could be truly revealed (not just fake revealed as we get from Deepstate) […]
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It was just cost
Speaking of default replacements for horses… Outside of city delivery, gas vehicles were the default replacement. And it wasn’t about Innovative Disruption, it was about a HUGE difference in cost. A logging and lumber company in Rhode Island replaced its three teams of horses… By this truck, carrying and pulling the same amount of logs… […]
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