Tag: Equipoise
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Fair and DOESN’T miss anything
Following on previous about sugar and spice. Another Nieman item. Bloomberg and DailyMail are trying something new which SHOULD have been old. They recognize that social media is taking care of basic information for free. They’re finally grasping the two-way obligation of SERVICE in exchange for money. = = = = = START QUOTE: Boyce…
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Reprint on retail politics
Reprint from 2021 spawned by previous on bets vs reality. Yet another proposal to counteract big money in politics: At their heart, political campaigns are no different than any other organization: they need to raise revenues and then spend it to meet their objectives. Organizations are responsive to who pays them, and therefore, the only…
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We weren’t scared of novelty!
Comment seen elsewhere, intending to make the analogy with AI. I’m old enough to remember when people were scared of these new “computers” and saw no need for them. At first I thought, yeah, I remember that too. Then I remembered more precisely. 1. I was mature when PCs started. Nobody was scared of them.…
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Skinner’s good ideas
Bucky Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, BF Skinner. Three nasty bastards, cult figures in the 70s, direct ancestors of the tech tyrants. Fuller was utterly worthless. His weird shit was impractical, dangerous, inefficient, contrary to science and engineering. McLuhan had one big valid idea, but got the details wrong. Skinner’s big idea of tabula rasa equality was…
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Economics as a verb
Rehash of my 2012 Economics As A Verb, modified for current relevance. = = = = = START REHASH: We get locked into booms and busts, inflations and deflations, because we forget that our measuring unit is only a measure. In Alan Watts’s famous metaphor, a carpenter wouldn’t stop work because he “ran out of…
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Prison is better 2
Mangione was charged separately by state and feds. As usual the feds didn’t have jurisdiction. As usual they found a technical way to charge him with fake crap like “stalking”. Today his lawyers got rid of the fake crap by pleading guilty. The real state case is still on pause. Smart lawyers ALWAYS TAKE THE…
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Pay structure
In school we “learned” a list of alleged propaganda methods. None of them were real. The list itself was propaganda to distract us from real propaganda. One effective REAL method is distorting verb aspect, treating a permanent or habitual process as something new and unknown. Weather becomes CLIMATE EMERGENCY! Flu season becomes VIRUS PLAGUE! Corruption…
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Fake surprise as always
Half of what passes for “news” is fake surprise. Propagandists love to attribute a permanent condition like weather or corruption to a “surprising” “unprecedented” action by Horrible Wrong Party. Nice example. Wired warns us that Instagram has “suddenly” decided to chew up your photos in AI without permission. Nonsense. This has ALWAYS been the basic…
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Sweet and sour largesse
Tech demons are hammering us with Sweet and Sour sides of an argument. The Sour tech demons, aided by Philosopher MacAskill, tell us straight out that we must lose our jobs and die for the good of future generations. We must be exterminated because we are non-self-aware inanimate objects. After we have been disinfected from…
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Suits dilute
Via Courthouse News: Some ambulance-chasing lawyers are building a class action suit against the WaPo. Not for anything remotely related to 50 years of bias. Nope, they’re suing because the WaPo charges different prices for subscriptions at different times. What’s wrong with charging different prices? That’s BUSINESS. Newspapers are not utilities like water and electric…
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Pride and skill
Unions are a NECESSARY feedback system in capitalism. A union is a bank for human skills, exerting bullypower against the Share Value banks. We lost unions 40 years ago along with all the other countervectors. UNLIKE the other losses, I can’t blame Wall Street. Industrial unions fouled their own nests by helping Wall Street to…
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Good law, still missing a big point
Both parts of the NY state legislature have passed a clear and well-written bill to constrain Altman. The human side was crafted by the writers and actors unions, who know what they’re talking about. The technical side also shows unusual clarity, which makes me curious about the source of the expertise. On the human side:…
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Goddamn slimy
I rarely take the same side as CNN. I always take the side of Equipoise, paying for value. In this case CNN is on the right side, and the AI monster is pulling a sneaky slimy trick. CNN is suing Perplexity for stealing its copyrights. CNN tried to set up a licensing deal, which is…
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A nice helper for Windows shit
One of the nastiest obstructions introduced by Microsoft in recent years is the totally individualized file menu. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FOLDER gets its own style of viewing. You have to stop and alter EVERY SINGLE FUCKING FOLDER to make it readable. There is a hugely difficult and tricky way to make SOME of them usable.…
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Harding reprint
Trying to recharge my courage after a hard week. Two windstorms and a snowstorm, lost sleep, no progress on a tangled courseware problem. Reprinted from March 2020, Harding’s commentary on the condition of the world in 1920. Still magnificent. Audio and transcript are here. = = = = = START MAGNIFICENT SPEECH: My countrymen, there…
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