Tag: skill-estate
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The open source spirit
Halfway related to skill as copyright and secret. One of my perpetual Why So Late questions is electric starting for cars. Electric cars came before gas cars, and several of the early makers had both types at once. Studebaker electrified its buggy in 1902, then bought the Garford company in 1904 to join the gas…
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Rall and secrecy
Ted Rall is a partisan idiot, reliably supporting DNC while pretending to be “independent”. In this column Rall makes a correct point for the wrong partisan reasons. Rall’s point: 100% of government secrecy is unneeded and irrelevant. All the secrets of government could be truly revealed (not just fake revealed as we get from Deepstate)…
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QED
Eric Holloway has been cleverly ‘interrogating’ AI chatbots, and he’s pretty sure that they are using actual humans as backups. It’s hard to prove from the internal evidence, because the AI could have been programmed to run the usual Deepstate hall of mirrors. Now it’s proved. OpenAI is running boiler rooms of Kenyans at slave…
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Where are they going?
I’m still wondering where Substack is going. Some of their hidden purpose is starting to show up with a focus on becoming the new mass media, led by Bari Weiss. This will inevitably lead right back to censorship. The same thing already happened with Bari Weiss’s other push, the “free university”. They’re still waiting for…
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Why miss a chance to show your skill 2
Brazil’s auto industry used to apply considerable design skill to its adaptations of foreign cars. Willys and Ford and GM and VW all had Brazilian plants that began with assembly and quickly expanded into truly original products. Now Brazil’s extension of our Deepstate is copying FBI products with no adaptation or originality at all. FBI…
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Why miss a chance to show your skill?
This is one of my perpetual puzzles. In the ’40s and early ’50s, the best Euro cars tried amazingly hard to omit taillights. Designers who lavished close attention to shapes and grilles and roofs and dashboards simply ignored taillights, tacking on microteensy standardized pinpricks way down behind the bumper. Taillights were apparently obscene. Two haute…
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Where’s the effect?
Stoller is extolling a new decision by the Federal Trade Commission to ban non-compete agreements. FTC claims this will raise wages by $2000 for an average worker. This doesn’t make sense. Non-compete agreements have been around for a long time. They were always used for executives and salesmen, and apparently they’re now used in other…
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W[h]ales
According to this piece at Medium, the planning for Charles’s eventual death started as soon as he took office. If he carries the good genes, the planners should have 30 years to get ready. The plan for Elizabeth’s death was called Operation London Bridge. The new plan is called Operation Menai Bridge, after the Menai…
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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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Year-end shit
Not in a mood for a year-end or Xmas piece. I’ll repeat 2020’s piece, which still holds true, then add one vaguely quasi-semi-hemi-demi-positivishesque note. = = = = = START REPRINT: Guess I should continue the habit of doing a year-end dump. Not worth it this time. 2020 needs to be thrown away and skipped,…
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High value crops
Thinking about the various natural drugs in terms of geography and value. Drugs intrinsically have more value than wheat or corn, just as entertainment automatically has more value than facts. First distinction: Tobacco and tea and coffee and marijuana are crops. Alcohol is a disease, resulting from spoilage in any sugary or starchy plant. Anyone…
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Nice exception
One of the neighbors always puts up a complex light and sound Xmas display. As I walked past it yesterday it was chiming Rudolph. I’m always bitching about the cruel jokes of Cinderella and Ugly Duckling. Attractive people bamboozle unpopular people into wasting their lives in futile pursuit of unachievable goals. Rudolph is an admirable…
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We weren’t allowed
Vintage.es has a set of pix from Moscow in December 1959. The first thing I noticed is the lack of snow. Obviously cold, but all dry. (Not meaningful, just personally salient because I’ve been shoveling and raking 10 inches this week.) The second thing is a group of workers putting up a statue of Sputnik,…
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YES!
Brad Sherman told the truth about the entire blockchain enterprise in the “investigation” this morning. “Sam is not a snake in the Garden of Eden. The whole area is a garden of snakes.” Just now in an interview with Yahoo: “I would urge them to take those animal spirits and invest in real companies that…
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Three cheers for coal!
Following on Coal vs Ice: Coal is coming back, and New Nazi Torturist magazine hates it. The UK is set to get its first new deep coal mine in three decades after the government approved plans for a project in Cumbria, despite widespread opposition on environmental grounds. The Woodhouse Colliery in Whitehaven will produce about…
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