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Classic Nigerian Prince!
Haven’t seen one of these in a long time. Most scammers have moved on to more modern tricks. = = = = = START SWINDLE: Dear (my email), I am a private investigator and have been contracted by a financial institution to ascertain your relationship to an individual who died sometime ago. He died intestate…
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No mystery
Nieman has an article on a nonprofit local news startup in Wichita. It’s failing quickly, and the reasons are not mysterious. 1. The Wichita paper was a branch of a more successful paper in KC, and the management in KC thought they should be handled the same way. I’ve lived in both cities. Wichita is…
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Possible explanation
The basic Machiavelli trick is well-known. Divide people into Team A and Team B, set them against each other. The teams are so busy fighting each other that they have no energy left for resisting the ruler. In the last few years I’ve noticed an imbalance between the teams, which isn’t quite as familiar. When…
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Fessenden’s alternators
Now that I’ve described the alternator itself, back to Fessenden’s unique way of using alternators. In each of these I’m using an unrealistic miniature alternator for convenience. There were some relatively small alternators, but most were huge beasts used as high-power transmitters. These three circuits weren’t among Fessenden’s patents. They were described and diagrammed in…
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Protecting against invasion
In these Paris street pictures from 1962, one thing stands out. ALL the cars and trucks are French. No exceptions. I don’t see any Fiats or VWs or American cars. Most are Renaults, with a mix of Peugeot and Citroen and Simca. Other Euro countries were more cosmopolitan at the time, even Germany and Italy…
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Ted Williams Casinos
Slot machines make sense in an addictive way. They function like any other addiction. You think you’re going to win, and you win pleasure just often enough to keep you pumping the coins in. Other traditional casino games and most physical addictions have a better payout, sometimes more than 50% of the coins; but the…
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Fessenden’s coherer
A few years ago I did some features on Coherers, including a test of a real coherer. Fessenden tried his hand at a different form of coherer. The usual coherer was a tube of powdered metal which cohered into a semi-solid and conducted more current when RF was applied. Coherers served as a sort of…
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Better name
Dams are failing in Tennessee. This is a straightforward result of spending all our money on war and destruction and NONE AT ALL on repairing or building. Year after year congress passes trillion-dollar appropriations for “infrastructure” but NONE of that money actually goes toward building or repairing. Most of it ends up in the pockets…
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Back to good old preversion
The antivaxers are returning to older forms of OCD craziness like fluoride. Suddenly fluoridation is a big menace again, just as it was from the ’50s until the ’90s. Childrens Health Defense, organized by the antivaxers, is pushing a lawsuit against fluoridation. Most of these OCD fads are essentially commercial, pushed by sellers of supplements…
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If “democracy” means…
If “democracy” means responding to the will of the people, then the Trump campaign is deeply anti-democratic. Before the start of this “election” season I was getting several spam emails per day from the Trump campaign and frequent spam from a few different Democrats, both presidential and congressional. I used AOL’s automatic unsubscribe feature on…
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Aphid Day 2024
Sept 28, 2024. Today’s temperature reached 86, and the weather bureau sees nothing but cool from here on. The aphids suddenly appeared at 3PM. Are they saying this is really the LAST hot day? I hope so. This summer has been WAY too long, and the combination of poor sleep and stress got my anxiety…
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The Sechometer
Polistra is cranking a strange little machine, and the galvanometer needle is wiggling in response. The mysterious little gadget is a sechometer, with an equally mysterious name. It was made by Leeds and Northrup, one of the two big lab equipment companies. I wrote a series of features on L&N in 2021. Allegedly the name…
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Common sense from courts
Bitcoin fraudsters always pretend their schemes are decentralized and uncontrolled. Two different courts applied common sense to this criminality. = = = = = First, Coinbase is trying to argue that DeFi networks are simply a form of speech, since they don’t have a central controller, so they don’t need to register as securities. Courts…
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Profit leads to sanity
Via Variety, Scripps-Howard is laying off a large part of its “journalists”, along with everyone else in the deservedly dying “news” biz. = = = = = START QUOTE: “Amidst an already difficult linear television advertising marketplace, many brands and agencies have decided that advertising around national news is just too risky for them given…
Polistra's Mill
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