There’s something about the personality type who fixes cars that leads to bad music selection. But it’s a minor quibble. I’m sort of in awe of this whole thing.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Ship of Theseus, I explained it here a year or so ago. A 1955 Porsche is a very valuable thing indeed, but the one in the video has deteriorated to the point where the iron atoms are barely holding hands. Normally, restorations like this one aren’t attempted, because the car is too far gone. Then again, the customer is in Switzerland. Even the town drunks in Switzerland own distilleries, so I assume they could afford to pay some Britishers and French dudes to go the whole nine yards on the thing.
I think more things and more people should be like what you’re seeing in the video. Autos and many other large and small dollar things should be made to be less disposable. People should get very good at what they do, and should be paid to do it. And people should try to fix what’s broken before buying anything new.
And someone in Switzerland should adopt me. Say dad, can I borrow the car?
Solipsism is a term that gets thrown around a lot on these here intertunnels. Almost exclusively, it’s used to describe extreme egocentrism. Self-absorption. Narcissism. Okey dokey, nothing wrong with that. But solipsism is also a related philosophical idea. It’s not satisfied with being interested only in yourself. It posits that it’s not possible to be sure of anything but what goes on in your own mind. Therefore, the real world, and other people, might not even exist.
Solipsism as a philosophical concept is often added to Descartes resume. Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am. I’m not a big fan of thought experiments that only sound trenchant after four bong hits, so I’ve mostly given that line of intellectual country a wide berth. Wondering if you’re the only person on earth, or in the universe for that matter, isn’t likely to yield useful answers.
I remember some species of science teacher in high school who was infatuated with the idea that you don’t really sit on a chair. His idea was that the atoms in your arse are repelled by the atoms in the chair, so you’re really floating in an infinitesimal slice of mid-air. I was loath to tell him that his conjecture was oh so very interesting, but the principle wouldn’t matter much if I hit him with the chair, which I felt like doing. I didn’t mention it then, but I am now.
Still, solipsism as a mode of thought is beginning to acquire a life of its own. Most people are assembling, on the fly, a simulacrum of a life on their little pocket pandoras, and interacting with other fake lives while they do it. Now that robots have entered the chat, the fakeness is dialed up to 11.
Yesterday, I wanted to find out if a mesh wifi extender had an onboard ethernet plug, and if so, how to set it up without using a moronic phone app. It was deuced difficult to find the info I was looking for. I ended up on the Orinoco Erzatz Goods Emporium, and saw a bunch of video reviews of the device I’d settled on. I turned one on. It was the saddest sort of thing I could imagine. There was a slovenly dude looking into a laptop camera in a widowless room, acting as if he was hosting his own TV show. It had credits. It had an opening musical fanfare. The guy did nothing but read what was on the box.
I was watching a personality cult of one. And he didn’t have any personality. And everyone’s like him now. Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth and we had teevee but no internet, any time a teevee camera was pointed at anyone, anywhere, people would crowd around and try to get in the frame, and act goofy to be memorable. To be on teevee, even by accident, was the most notable accomplishment they could aspire to. They’d rush home and call everyone they knew and tell them they’d be on the evening news, even if they were just mugging behind some caution tape in the background of a car crash segment.
Of course this is all old news to you veteran internauts. But watching a few moments of this fellow, I remember where I saw the phenomenon explained best, long before social media turned everyone into a deranged talk show host without an audience:
Be careful, people, It’s a short trip from Cosmo Kramer to Rupert Pupkin:
Then again, when Rupert got out of prison, he got his own show on teevee. Most YouTub video producers would take that deal. So maybe a Rene Descartes cardboard cutout isn’t the right guy to interview in your basement. Up next, after these messages from our associates accounts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe!
I’m not sure what makes it deluxe, exactly. It appears to be just like a regular Tuesday Trash Day Roundup. But the intertunnel is all about marketing, n’est ce pas? I can’t just leave it at that. I have to excite the audience, right there in the headline, or they won’t even tune in. You can always disappoint them with everything after the initial come-on. This was also my approach to dating.
Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users’ responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction.
Like Marcus Aurelius once said, “You shouldn’t believe everything you see on the internet.”
Players start at Washington and race to reach New Orleans first by taking turns spinning a teetotum, an alternative to dice, as that was seen as a symbol of gambling. The educational board game fits its description as an “instructive pastime” as players have to name the city to move forward and, in a harder version of the game, be able to guess the urban population.
After the first article, I’m unsure whether Arkansas is actually a place.
The results show that college is still worth it—sometimes. The median four-year degree program increases students’ lifetime earnings by $160,000, after accounting for college costs and dropout risk. But not every degree performs so well. Nearly a quarter of four-year programs show no return on investment (ROI), meaning that students typically wind up no better off than if they never went to college. But plenty of degrees deliver returns significantly above the median—and some boost students’ net lifetime earnings by more than $1 million.
Where else are you going to learn how to clutch a Solo cup properly?
Do you struggle with balancing comfort with utility in your daily business attire? You can never go wrong with the classic short sleeved white shirt, and tie. Also, make sure you wear comfortable shoes and socks. Keep cool with shorts, but keep that shirt tucked in. You don’t want to appear too informal for those business meetings.
Do not click through to the link while drinking any beverage, if you value your monitor.
In the daytime—as scholars lean over historic works and visitors admire the architecture—the bats roost quietly behind the two-story bookshelves. At night, they swoop around the darkened building, eating the beetles and moths that would otherwise do a number on all that old paper and binding glue.
In our local library, perverts stationed at computers just inside the front door guard the books. I’d prefer bats.
In need of a practical way to overcome social isolation; communicate emergencies, weather, and crop prices; and chafing under attempts to curtail free speech, ranchers and farmers began to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of both telephone sets and barbed wire fencing. They would hook up telephones to wire strung from their homes to a nearby fence; at the time, telephones had their own battery which produced a DC current that could carry a voice signal; turning a crank on the phone would generate an AC current to produce a ring at the end of the line. Bob Holmes elaborates on the process: “the barbed wire networks had no central exchange, no operators–and no monthly bill. Instead of ringing through the exchange to a single address, every call made every phone on the system ring. Soon each household had its own personal ringtone…but anyone could pick up…Talk was free, and so people soon began to ‘hang out’ on the phone.” The fence phone lines could also be used to broadcast urgent information to everyone on the line.
Used for barbed remarks, with a sharp followup, no doubt.
Microsoft estimates the CrowdStrike outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices. That’s an unprecedented breakdown. But it is also a reminder that the problem could have been so much worse: The afflicted computers represent less than 1 percent of Windows devices around the world. Still, the CrowdStrike crash—or BSOD24 as I’m calling it—should be a global wake-up call.
I’ve always said the old ways are generally the best ways. So I propose we run the internet through barbed wire fencing from now on. I’m willing to put a hand crank on my old Dell desktop, and I’ll gladly suffer the occasional tingle when I’m out mending fences and my neighbor tries to buy something from Amazon.
In a pitch deck that has surfaced since the initial story broke out, Cox Media Group (CMG), a digital marketing outfit based out of Atlanta, Georgia, was spotted touting “the power of voice” in a pitch. In it, they outlined how they can use AI to collect and analyze voice data from users through more than 470 sources. All of which can then be used by advertisers to target “in-market consumers” (users) when combining the voice data with behavioral data to identify an audience who is “ready-to-buy” in a targeted 10-mile radius (can go up to 20-mile).
We’re going to have to go to Dante Alighieri’s Circle Takeout Cafe to find the appropriate place to send these guys.
That’s it for today’s batch of topics. Have a superb, Number One, bespoke, high end, luxurious Tuesday, everyone! *
*Your mileage might vary. No express or implied guarantee. No refunds or exchanges. Caveat emptor. Void where prohibited, and several other places, too.
In my experience, artists, in the few times they’re right about stuff, always seem to be right for the wrong reasons. Their intellectual house is furnished in odd ways, which helps them to see things differently than other folks. Because the intellectual furniture is in weird places, they tend to stumble over things other people pass by without noticing.
So they figure out the what where others miss it, but the how and why totally escapes them. It’s probably because they use the same, weird logic they use to achieve their strangeness to instruct others how to be normal. The leader of World Party was right-handed, but turned a right-handed guitar upside down and played it lefthanded. Outre approaches like that lead to interesting results, but they’re not likely to be of much use at someplace mundane like the water department.
Then again, this is a downright sensible sentiment to deal with the Ship of Fools problem:
So the world might indeed end tomorrow. But Ship of Fools was recorded in 1986, and it hasn’t yet. Its composer Karl Edmond De Vere Wallinger died last March.
It reminds me of something an economist once said. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
Month: September 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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