Tag: skill-estate
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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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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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