Tag: defensible times
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Speaking of Harding…
A Harding speech from Dec 8, 1922, a little more than 100 years ago. This is how a PROBLEM-SOLVING president would talk right now. Substitute NAZI TORTURE for war to modernize. = = = = = START HARDING: So many problems are calling for solution that a recital of all of them, in the face…
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Milk comes from cartons
MindMatters is belatedly grasping the tenure problem. People who work inside academia have known and recognized this for many decades. My father saw it when he started work as a prof in 1957, and warned me about it. Everyone knows it, but outsiders, even outsiders who attend college for four years, don’t hear about it.…
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What’s worse than DDT?
Reading a Reddit thread about sounds we used to hear. Modems, rotary dials, antenna rotors, the 15750 horizontal flyback in TV (interestingly, the thread has 15,700 comments right now!), dial tones and busy signals. I’m mostly analog, never switched from landline to cellphone, so some of these are still common for me. One steady theme…
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They don’t make em…
A NYC writer observes Sammy’s arraignment: An uncomfortable-looking SBF pleaded not guilty to all charges. He was seen chewing the corners of his mouth throughout the 30-minute hearing and smearing on lip balm, which he squeezed out of a little black tube. Last night I was listening to a 1950 Mutual newscast including a parallel…
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From an extremely same/different era
After finding the origin of ringers in this 1927 volume of Vanity Fair I started reading the rest of the magazine. 1927 was the peak of a Share Value boom, so it was like 2017 as measured by aristocrats. The two booms are drastically different as measured by peasants. 1927 was overgrown from a REAL…
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Man vs machine reprint
Reading the endless (sometimes valid) commentary about AI and lost skills, remembered that I had hit the subject from an unconventional angle in 2014. This probably belongs in the Thiel Question category. It certainly deserves a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: Heard a PSA from a union-based group trying to restore full…
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Seeing the whole graph
A brief feature on Yahoo Finance shows that the new “alarming” trend toward youngsters staying with parents is not alarming at all. A screencap of the relevant graph: This shows the percent of younger folks 18-29 who are living with parents. The underlying article at Business Insider links to Census data, but the Census website…
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The ice industry, part 1/5
I’ve always been puzzled by the long persistence of household iceboxes. Mechanical refrigeration was invented around 1880. Ice plants had formerly used natural ice from ponds or from frozen pools, requiring massive insulation and storage, but rarely lasting through the summer. They started using refrigeration soon after its invention, and by 1910 all ice production…
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The ice industry, part 2/5
Who invented ice? Fredric Tudor. Obviously ice is a large part of the world, but nobody thought of it as a salable commodity until 1805. Tudor was a wealthy Boston kid with an unbreakable passion for sailing and trading. He knew that spices were the source of many fortunes, but spices were inadequate for preserving…
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The ice industry, part 3/5
The Enid Ice Plant, photographed in the 1920s and seen on the EnidBuzz facebook page, inspired this piece: Ice trade journals from the era list this company as Enid Ice and Fuel, which is a rational business model. They were processing and delivering portable energy, lumps of heat and blocks of cold. The visible tracks…
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The ice industry, part 4/5
How did the ice plant make its portable blocks of coldness? The method was unexpectedly complicated. Here’s the coldroom, where the compressed and relatively cool ammonia is allowed to relieve its pressure and absorb heat from the water that will become ice. What’s going on inside? We have a grid in the floor, over a…
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Atomic house
Expanding a random thought in previous. Through most of history, families lived together. In many parts of the world families still live together. American houses built before 1946 made provisions for internal subgroups with occupied basements, occupied attics, and occupied porches. The ‘nuclear family’ crammed into a tight one-story house was part of Deepstate’s 1946…
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Stop the goddamn fake surprise.
The latest official line about Bankman-Fried is the old “Nobody expected!” “Missed warning signs!” Raw ratshit. The regulators and political operators knew full well what Sam was doing. Many of them were in constant contact with him, and he certainly wasn’t shy about stating openly and clearly what he was doing. He said “I AM…
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Division of labor
Civilization formerly mitigated the natural force of status and attractiveness by setting up a division of labor, and judging mates on their capacity for the appropriate type of labor. Civilization is long gone, so this is irrelevant. One of those supershort Ripley features mentioned a highly specific test for brides. Ripley described it as a…
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Print equivalent
My bedtime OTR playlist has changed its form over the years, partly from available material and partly from my tastes. In the ’90s when I started pulling away from current toxic crap and seeking older and better entertainment, the only available tape cassettes carried the Big Shows like Fibber and Jack Benny. After the early…
Polistra's Mill 