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Didn’t really need proof.
Canadians are unquestionably less noisy and less violent than Americans. Lit firework thrown in Waterloo is a HEADLINE. If one day went by WITHOUT some asshole tossing a lit firework and starting a brush fire, it would be a banner headline here. Unrelated: The streetcar tracks in the video caught my attention. Does Waterloo have…
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Odd behavior
Facebook and Substack have both started doing an odd thing lately. Both occasionally send emails with an old item from the archive. Facebook says I should enjoy reviewing some random comment I wrote back in March. Not the same as reprinting an old article because it’s relevant to today’s events. That’s a rational way to…
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Facta
One discussion of Prevost’s background mentioned a school whose motto is Facta non verba. Google doesn’t find the reference now, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t AI-hallucinate it. The Endarkenment inverted the meaning of factum. In Latin a factum was simply a completed task, a got-r-done**. Now we think facts are authorized descriptions of the…
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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…
Polistra's Mill
Be your own beacon.
