Tag: skill-estate
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Starlight to Sonnabend?
It’s always fun to explore whatifs surrounding Studebaker. Here’s one that hasn’t been explored much. In 1958, after Curtiss-Wright had already LBO’d and raided the company’s best assets, management hired Abraham Sonnabend to start developing new niches. He got to work quickly and efficiently on a low budget, acquiring several profitable mid-size companies that were…
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Ginrut?
AI textbots have become so convincing that some people are writing their own material and falsely attributing it to the GPT3 bot for more credibility! Is this an inverse Turing test? Converse? Inside-out? Mobius? Mass-production writers have turned to the artistic AIs like DALL-E to make their required clickbait pics at the top of every…
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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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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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Reprint on jail and jobs
First written 11/1/17, linked in previous item, worth a reprint. = = = = = START REPRINT: An article in Aeon starts with an excellent and evocative question: Should life in jail be worse than outside, on principle? Author Chris Barker is a prof at a small POST-Christian college (Methodist) in Winfield. You don’t see…
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Why 1907 needed scrip
Enid Buzz posted this ad from an Enid clothing store in 1907. On account of scarcity of currency reminds us that the Panic of 1907 was a huge but brief Innovative Disruption, sponsored by Innovative Disruptor Edison. Scrip was born in this depression, and resurrected in 1933 when FDR broke the banks to restore the…
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Impressive and depressive
Now that I’ve got the dull parts of the new courseware version out of the way (switching out images to adjust for changes in DRM) I’m returning to the fun part. I’m reviving and modernizing some complex programs I wrote in the ’90s, so they can be presented as ‘accessories’ to the courseware. The impressive…
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Random rust thoughts
I’ve always been annoyed that the auto industry was based in Rust Central, but built cars for use in Arizona. Kaiser could have switched this trend if Henry Kaiser had been USING HIS OWN COMPANY’S TALENTS. Aluminum was the core of his business in 1947, and he could have made cars with aluminum bodies. Rustproof,…
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A clear view of exp vs linear
One basic fact about money is always understood by the plutocrats but never explained to the peasants. We hear inflation numbers or exchange rate numbers, and the influencers of “left” and “right” base their appeals on these fake numbers. Even the bitcoiners, who claim to be entirely outside government and banking, always treat official “inflation”…
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Money as delta
Both sides in the pointless battle between bitcoin and fiat are missing the biggest point. I’m also missing it most of the time, though I did hit it once or twice. I was reminded of the point by the recent amazing finding about spores. Like many actively living things, spores contain an abacus that counts…
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Wasted imagination
Inside the convoluted world of bitcoin scams, a lot of super-smart nerds are working hard, probably for very little pay, to develop ever-denser convolutions. Here’s one sample found on Medium. There are HUNDREDS of projects like this, each with its own purposeless purpose, always ENABLING USER to do something that no actual human could ever…
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Pointless peeve
I keep hearing rumors and claims that the Repooflicans are learning lessons about the importance of JOBS and SKILLS. So far I haven’t seen any evidence for those rumors and claims. Here’s a column by AEI that doubles down on the same old shit in the WORST possible way. The column is mainly by Phil…
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and…
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Refunders vs hoarders
This is completely irrelevant and overly nuanced, but it’s what I want to write about today…. Duane Jones, in his wonderful little book about advertising and human nature, gets hardass at times. He talks openly about forcing a purchase. Here he’s discussing the money-back guarantee: = = = = = Mr Burke was silent for…
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More Foy
Continuing on automation vs skills. An old-fashioned union could effectively solve the problem of AI taking over from artists. Union shops place a union label (sometimes called a bug) on publications and products. Bugs are much less common in recent decades, but you can still see them on some products, and they are useful information…
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