Essays
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Cruel, Stupid, or Both?
The Affordable Care Act has now been around for 15 years. It’s a very complicated combination that accommodates greed, human rights, and pragmatism. The greed it accommodates comes from the demands of the wealthy and powerful health insurance industry, which now believes it’s entitled to profit from misery because…well, because. I’m using “human rights” as… Continue reading
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About prepping
“Prepping” is a trendy meme, and it seems to usually means preparing a backpack with stuff you’ll need when you leave the city or town and go live a life of brave, individual survivalism in the woods. That is delusional; a fantasy that comes from watching too many movies. A lot of aspects of our… Continue reading
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What is twitter really for?
I’ve been thinking about “social media” quite lot lately. And here I’m focusing on twitter-like systems more than, say facebook. Services, that is, that are for short messages that are widely distributed, the authors have little control over once they’re posted, and that have such a massive flow of data that the focus of the… Continue reading
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To Anxious Friends
The editorial below was written by William Allen White on July 27, 1922. The disorder of the day, which he mentions, was a nationwide railroad strike. In 1922, railroads were critical infrastructure — they still are, but in 1922 there were no alternatives. White was the editor of the Emporia Gazette of Emporia, Kansas, where… Continue reading
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Passions, Products, and Utility
or: It’s Just a Phone The MacPsych blog has an interesting post about mobile phones, on the occasion of the latest Apple “event” introducing new iPhoniana. They say: “I have read lots of differing perspective online, from fanboy exclamations of ‘the best phone everrrrrr!’ through to the much more realistic ‘it’s just a fucking phone’. As time passes,… Continue reading
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Simple tools
There are certain things I very much like about old-school unix software. I’m talking about the command-line utilities that were each designed to do one thing very well. To accomplish a more complex task, or in modern lingo, “workflow,” you could easily combine several programs, sending the output of one to the input of another,… Continue reading
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The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” – Abraham Lincoln Lincoln’s words come from the Lyceum Address, more formally titledThe Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, IllinoisJanuary 27,… Continue reading
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Just tariffic
The orange baby just sent a “letter” (evidently on its twitter platform) to South Korea threatening to impose large tariffs on South Korean goods unless they do something about the “Trade Deficits (sic) engendered by your Tariff, and Non Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers.” South Korea and the US have had a free trade agreement,… Continue reading
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And yet…
Reinhold Niebuhr was a widely known public intellectual in 20th Century America. He was a theologian who spent the bulk of his career as a professor at a seminary in Manhattan, NY. Did you know they had those there? Seems unexpected. Anyway, he had some fascinating ideas, including something called “Christian Realism.” I’m not sure… Continue reading
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It’s over
More and more people, at least those who post the things they write, are realizing that the American experiment is over, done, and failed. This country is not a democracy any more, and it’s no longer organized according to the founders or the Constitution they wrote. The elderly, rich, white men who somehow got themselves… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Once more, into the breach
- Be Here Now. And Sit.
- Why the fear of dead air?
- But all my friends say I should…
- War games
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
Stories
Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences