Tag: skill-estate
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Why India wins
I’ve been hammering these points: We’re fucked because we’ve been lying about caste for 200 years. We substitute all sorts of other shit like IQ and hard work and ideology. Those variables aren’t entirely irrelevant but the base constant of human activity is CASTE. Caste is innate and permanent. The distribution of castes occasionally shifts…
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Close but no pierogi.
Via UncommonDescent, a new hypothesis about human intelligence is generally wiser and more ‘non-partisan’ than the usual Darwin crap. The article acknowledges that brain size is not the major variable, but still clings to the energy-consumption model. The discovery of fire made us smarter because cooked food is easier to digest. First, easier digestion DOES…
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Best thing in the universe
Noted via Reddit, the Broken Arrow schools near Tulsa are teaching biology and physics as part of fly-fishing! = = = = = START QUOTE: “Over a month ago, we started taking a look at insects,” he said. “Then we started learning how to mimic insects, to fly tie, and now we’re putting these flies…
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Unrealistic
TheFederalist makes a somewhat valid point: In a world where the left has achieved near-total dominance of the cultural space, finding an openly conservative artist can feel like tracking down an endangered species. Unfortunately, like poachers in the jungle, the left is on the hunt. While leftist artists can openly spew their bile for the…
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Skill vs status
Carver in 1913: Start where you are. Work with what you have. Make something of it. Never give up. Here’s a fable showing what happens when you disobey Carver. Around 1915, Ford’s total mastery of high quantity at low price forced everyone else out of that position. Later, Cadillac’s total ownership of the luxury market…
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A craft that adapted
Looking for more info on old trucks and such, came across the American Blacksmith journal from 1917. Real work and real creativity adapt smoothly to changed circumstances. The evil Innovative Disrupters cackle at the “obsolescence” of buggy whips and blacksmiths, because the evil Innovative Disrupters are demonic genocidal murderers. In fact blacksmiths simply broadened their…
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Good point, best point
Pretty good point from Kirn: AI Chatbots simply formalize & make explicit the profoundly inert nature of collective thinking that made real artists & writers attractive in the first place. They are more important than ever now, in fact, as second-rate pseudo-creativity has consolidated itself as never before. Vastly stronger point from one of his…
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Great Smith footnote
Bought a coffee-table book on Great Cars of the Great Plains by Curt McConnell. It features five notable and fairly successful early autos, including the Great Smith of Topeka. One of them, Moon in St Louis, became a mid-sized company and lasted till 1929. Most auto histories mention the Moon, if only because its factory…
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Took longer than they thought
American Radio Library has added more issues of Philco News. Skimming through the sequence shows the fadeout of US electronics. From 1930 to 1950, Philco was a top producer of consumer products, from radios and TVs to appliances. Philco was proud of its focus on consumers instead of shareholders. After 1950, the magazine focuses more…
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Revolutionary design?
NASA announces with great fanfare a revolutionary method of propelling rockets. The RDRE differs from a traditional rocket engine by generating thrust using a supersonic combustion phenomenon known as a detonation. This design produces more power while using less fuel than today’s propulsion systems and has the potential to power both human landers and interplanetary…
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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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