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MIL Cliff
About 40k federal bureaucrats are being fired. The old Mother-in-law / cliff joke applies perfectly. In the broadest sense I’m glad to see Trump breaking Parkinson’s Law. The devil is in the details. Some bureaucrats, specifically the Die-Versity types, are mother-in-laws for the real economy. They just bitch and lecture us, serve no useful purpose.…
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He’s right for once!
Krugman is usually wrong about economics, but he’s hit on a splendid truth here. Elon’s attempt to take over the Treasury for his own psychopathic purposes will be stymied by old-fashioned mainframes running Cobol. YES! Tech tyrants hate mainframes and Cobol. Cobol requires you to lay out everything carefully and maintain constant order. You can’t…
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What does he think he’s doing?
The guy who runs the Spokane News facebook page has a good thing going. Facebook lists 270k followers, which is the whole adult population of the Spokane metro. I check the site several times a day, more often when power outages and windstorms are around. He posts police reports on crashes, overdoses and fires, and…
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Remarkable similarity
I remembered that Canada had a more formal anthem before O Canada was adopted in 1980. I hadn’t listened to it in full before. Now it reminds me FIRMLY of the Macedonian anthem. The tunes are similar. Both are packed with specific names and places and the dauntless deeds of old heroes. Macedonia: I went…
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Solid victory
A court has laid down an important decision against the AI thieves. An AI gang was stealing info from Reuters’s Westlaw database and using it to build its own competing product. The judge found that Reuters’s copyrights were infringed by the thieves. In this specific case there won’t be an actual payment because the thief…
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Could learn, won’t.
Polls show that Trudeau’s party is overtaking Poilievre’s conservatives. There’s a wildly obvious lesson here. If you want customers, offer a GOOD PRODUCT that can SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS. If you want votes, offer a GOOD PRODUCT that can SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS. Before this year, Trudeau was a poisonous product and his party had lost all…
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Brutalist typography
This 1970s film is teaching journalism students about proper design. It’s unapologetically brutalist, in the same denaturing spirit as Corbusier in architecture or Cage in music. Remove all beauty. Remove all decorations. Remove all variation and improvisation. Only stark colorless rectangles are allowed. Replace it with squared-off type masses… Short words, short sentences and short…
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Celebrate reform
I’m obsessing on Canada lately, which is definitely atypical and surprised me when it happened. What’s going on? Since 2020 I’ve been HUNGRY to find ANY government ANYWHERE** that is doing the right thing. I don’t ENJOY hating all rulers. It isn’t fun. Before 2020 I appreciated several governments, notably Russia. In 2020 all governments…
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Voice of experience
This guy knows what he’s talking about. He was formerly the Canadian director of NORAD, and worked with US officials and military. He realized that Trump’s threats were bluff and bluster in his first term, but sees Trump as serious about annexation this time. He correctly appreciates that the Canadian government is FINALLY becoming POPULIST…
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Should have said it here
As usual I should have written this item here first. I wrote it as a comment on Peter Menzies’s substack blog about Canadian media and politics. Menzies was sad to see Canadians no longer trusting their elephantine neighbor. I’ve been wanting to say the same thing from an internal perspective, but this expresses the point.…
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Long overdue
In previous item I noted that CKWX in Vancouver was using a British Anglia truck for its remote broadcasts in 1953. Canada was still close to the Commonwealth. In 1965 the first “free trade” treaty began the process of dismantling Canadian sovereignty and pulling Canada away from the Sovereign. Here’s the CKWX truck in 1966:…
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Cute leftover
I was looking at the Weather Bureau’s average charts, trying to see how far below normal this week is. Noticed a quaint leftover of ancient mainframe programming practices akin to Y2K. Feb 29 is missing this year but present in leap years, so the form has to mark N/A in some way. It incorrectly fills…
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Trump and Polk
From CBC. Trudeau talked with Trump and says the 51st state threat is serious. Trudeau’s press people say “There will be no messing with the 49th parallel. Period.” This mention of latitude reminded me of an obscure and forgotten dispute. 54-40 or Fight! was a slogan used by Polk in the 1844 election. 54 degrees…
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More healthy Canadian response
Canadian mayors are uniting to keep the country strong in the face of Trump’s attempted takeover. They’re talking with US mayors near the border, hoping to gain the support of US business and labor unions. I’m not sure the latter will work. The real Trump is Wall Street, and US corporations love the real Trump.…
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No need to interpret this dream.
Unlike the previous one, this morning’s dream was explicit and positive. I was at some kind of party. An older Jewish professor started haranguing me, trying to persuade me to attend Yom Kippur in Virginia Beach (?????) so I would meet a nice Jewish girl and become normal. He got clumsily violent, pushing and prodding…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
Polistra's Mill 