Tag: Asked and unanswered
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Why do they join?
Latest stupid news: The usual D team is suing the Ellison monsters for trying to merge Warner and Paramount. The Ellisons were fine when they wore the D team shirt. Now they’ve joined the R team so they’re not fine. This is a constant rule. Why did the Ellisons put themselves into this position? They…
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Did Eyman retire?
The latest idiotic “anti-tax” referendum is operated by hedge fund billionaire Brian Heywood. He wants to repeal a 9% surcharge on income over a million passed by this year’s state “legislature”. Shockedshocked etc. Sarc off: I truly don’t know why rich assholes play the referendum game. It calls attention to them, costs extra money, and…
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Why so early?
Just putting this down so I won’t forget it…. I’m always asking Why So Late? In this case the puzzlement is reversed. Why were horseless carriages licensed so quickly? Horses and buggies had not been licensed. It appears that state licenses for cars began around 1905. Horses were still completely dominant. A typical city might…
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Where’s the source?
When people quote their “conversations” with AI bots, I notice that the bots have a broad vocabulary of niceness and sycophantic obedience. The bots can say “I’m sorry” in dozens of creative ways. A few years ago I was dealing with customer service chatbots that repeatedly scheduled mythical technician appointments, then apologized when the mythical…
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Dividing by a fraction
I just finished the latest stage of ADA courseware with an especially hard and fast race to the end under pressure, and my mind needs to work on SOMETHING DIFFERENT for a while! This article on math teaching caught my attention. I used to teach math as part of teaching electronics. Fortunately we didn’t need…
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Marketing missed
Random and pointless thought about advertising. When Max Hoffmann started importing VWs in 1949 he tried to emphasize the cool factor. Before the war he had been a luxury car dealer in Austria, so he was accustomed to moving in cool circles. The appeal didn’t work until the 60s, then it hit hard, starting in…
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Not sure, sure
An interesting thought from Rushfield of the Ankler. = = = = = START RUSHFIELD: Among the many downsides of a presiding meritocratic elite is the takeover of the arts by a very narrow strata of individuals with a common pool of interests and obsessions. In literature, what that has meant is that portrayals of…
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Why the divide?
Writing this for my own purposes, trying to figure out WHY historians suddenly started looking at medieval times. WHEN is clear, around 1995. Googlebooks has abundant books after 2000, almost zero before. Sherri Olson’s first book was published in 1996. She does historiography along with history, discussing the timeline of people studying medieval times. She…
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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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One obvious, one mystery
For some reason** I just now noticed two firm social patterns in the 1950s. The first is universal and easily explained. The second is highly particular and unexplained. = = = = = 1. Males always called males by last name. Females called everyone by first name. This applied between teachers and students, and among…
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Trying to figure this out
The good bureaucrats in the Biden admin who worked to restore the New Deal restrictions on Men Of Monopoly are now seeing their work smashed and deleted. This didn’t have to happen. It didn’t happen the first time, so the alternative is POSSIBLE. The original New Deal was NOT smashed by the next few presidents.…
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More dust to wait for
Via DailyMail, with the usual caution about DailyMail’s usual wild exaggerations. Trump, working with ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST RFK, has ordered several agencies to stop their Twitter and other public output for a while. We don’t know yet what this means. He undoubtedly remembers how the agencies spent most of their PR time bashing Trump. I noticed…
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No good explanation yet
The Due Dissidence Dudes take a close look at the sudden shift in corporate favor. In 2016 all corporations instantly hated Trump. When Trump encouraged a protest in January 2021, all corporations treated one protest as a universe-ending event, and sternly rejected everything remotely associated with the “right”. Now all corporations are flocking to suck…
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The Saudi divorce
Thinking about the universal blocking principle. Patents block innovation, investment blocks business, outsourcing blocks useful work. I forgot to include war in the list. Our wars since 1990 have been blocking wars. Before Wilson we fought to ACQUIRE resources in Latin America and Asia because we had a PRODUCTIVE economy, not a BLOCKING economy. WW1…
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