Tag: Modest proposal
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Won’t happen
The “city” “government” could solve two problems at once with One Weird Trick, but they won’t. REAL problem: Bums are lighting campfires everywhere for cooking, even in 95-degree weather. Bums cause wildfires everywhere, keeping the fire dept busy and occasionally getting out of control. The “city” doesn’t see this as a problem unless the fires…
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Change one letter
Headline: Netanyahu nominates Trump for Nobel Prize. He’ll win. No doubt about it. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, then after the damage was done he started the prize to reward people who avoid dynamite. Since 1970 the prize has served Nobel’s commercial interests, not his pretended repentance. The prize goes to the biggest and best customer…
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Another modest proposal
Via NiemanLab: Some Americans still have trust in local news, but they’re unwilling to pay for it. As usual the “journalists” who caused this problem can’t figure it out. Well, send me something worth paying for and I’ll pay. I love to pay for good products and good services. I won’t bother to tell you…
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Modest proposal
If cities were smart they’d adopt Greg Abbott’s ingenious trick. An imaginary smart Spokane would round up all the homeless into prison buses and haul them to the state capitol in Olympia. Drop some of them in the state capitol building and other offices, drop the ones with the longest criminal records in the back…
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QC for advocates
The opposition party in Canada lost its support when Trudeau and Carney suddenly started doing the right thing. At the time I said that Poilievre should have declared victory and gone home. New thought: With real products, hardware or software, you don’t declare victory after the product launches and starts selling. At that point you…
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If Canada wants…
If Canada wants a REALLY BIG self-sufficiency project, they could build a pipeline to Europe. As I’ve noted before, there isn’t a lot of open ocean between Canada and Ireland. Ellesmere to Greenland to Iceland to Ireland would include frequent landfalls. The technology was already developed by Russia’s Nordstream, about the same length as the…
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Should have said it here
As usual I should have written this item here first. I wrote it as a comment on Peter Menzies’s substack blog about Canadian media and politics. Menzies was sad to see Canadians no longer trusting their elephantine neighbor. I’ve been wanting to say the same thing from an internal perspective, but this expresses the point.…
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Originality compounded
Via Cointelegraph, Trump is strongly favoring the insane idea of a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. As I’ve mentioned a few thousand times already, bitcoin is just a database or spreadsheet. One bitcoin is one row of a spreadsheet. There’s nothing original about strategic reserves. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated cells do it. People…
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Wouldn’t it be nice?
Via Protos, Paraguay is cracking down on bitcoin “miners”. Good to see a government acting sanely for once. The article includes two other surprising facts. Paraguay probably has the cleanest energy of any country, with essentially all of its power from one hydro dam. The dam makes extra profit by selling part of its power…
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Old idea
Noticed while looking for something else. Back in 2013 I came up with a pretty decent idea, then forgot about it. = = = = = START REPRINT: Was thinking about idiot Repooflican opposition to the Online Sales Tax, when a bigger point struck me. Our entire tax system is designed to discourage local production.…
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The Sonnabend solution
Thinking about Hudson led to a random thought about governments. Studebaker and Packard made plenty of identifiable constant mistakes, obvious to outsiders at the time, not just in hindsight. Above all Studie overpaid shareholders and underpaid factories and research. Packard kept trying to compete in luxury cars after Cadillac unquestionably owned the niche, and outsourced…
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Got my wish
A while ago somebody was writing about presidential debates sponsored by the Commission for Presidential debates, or CPD. The writer was complaining that the current candidates weren’t going through CPD. I wrote a “clever” comment: I don’t want CPD debates, I want CBD debates. Force both candidates to eat gummies, then let er rip. You…
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What do they really owe?
Compact mag says colleges owe students transparency about the actions and investments of their endowments. Maybe, but that’s not the FIRST thing colleges owe students. For 70 years all media and culture and corporations have been falsely advertising college as necessary for life and work. Purely false, and most parents and youngsters have figured it…
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Pointless peeve
I’m tired of seeing water bottles in every goddamn podcast and TED talk. Everyone unscrews the cap, sips tap water from disposable plastic, then screws the cap back on every goddamn time. There’s no reason to screw the cap on. You’re not going to put the bottle back in the refrigerator when you’re done. We…
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Demobilize
Here’s a modest proposal. We did it in 1920, and we did it in 1945, but then soon went backwards. We can do it again. We still have significant industrial capacity, but it’s mostly making weapons and surveillance equipment. Humans are MASSIVELY SUFFERING because there aren’t nearly enough USEFUL PHYSICAL JOBS FOR MEN. Demobilize. Stop…
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