Immorality
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Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth. Not everybody knows that the official title is Juneteenth National Independence Day. It’s the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US. Slavery was declared over by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took another two and a half years for the traitorous slavers to be defeated. That… Continue reading
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Why the Super A*sholes Are Ascendant
Robert Reich compared Musk with the orange baby, pointing out that “Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.“ And “Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.” He… Continue reading
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Less than zero
Is “economics” the worst, most egregious example of nonsense claiming to be some sort of science? It might not quite as far afield as, say, “ufology,” “astrology,” or “numerology,” but I think that’s because those other pursuits are not taken seriously except by their adherents. As far as I know, you can’t study or earn… Continue reading
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Why do we keep doing this?
I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American thing, or maybe a uniquely human thing, but damn, we fall for scams. All the time. Maybe it’s an off-the-charts ability that a few people have that make them able to come up with what they know is a lie, and get everybody within earshot to believe… Continue reading
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Weaponization?
The orange baby and its henchpuppets are planning to pay the January 6 traitors on the basis of having been prosecuted by a “weaponized” department of justice at the direction of Joe Biden. But hang on a second. Let’s look at an actual example, the “QAnon Shaman.” You remember, that shirtless oddball who stood out… Continue reading
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Oh spare us. No, really, I mean it.
I just found Dario Amodei’s apologia The Adolescence of Technology, from back in January. It’s quite long; Claude must have used tons of tokens writing it for him. Amodei can, of course, afford it. His essay is chock full of hand waving dismissals of reservations reasonable people might have about large language models (and the… Continue reading
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Everything learns
I don’t think it’s true that the orange baby isn’t rational. The problem it has is what it has experienced its whole life and career: getting away with everything it tried, no matter what. In some way you could look at it (the o.b.) as simply a statistical outlier, like an astonishingly lengthy string of… Continue reading
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Time to do better
The US is not going back to the way we were. And good riddance, in my view. Without meaning to, American society and business practices have become a means of enriching and aggrandizing despicable people. This is not entirely new, but it seems to me that it’s more common and systemic now. There is not… Continue reading
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It doesn’t care, except about power
The orange baby just launched a war it won’t explain. None of the lickspittles in its cabal will explain it either. Here’s a possibility. The premises: • Americans are coming to despise the orange baby, its pretend government, and its policies. • The orange baby knows this, even though what it says is, as usual,… Continue reading
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Distracted yet?
The orange baby will do anything, kill anybody, to save itself. It deserves at least to be in prison, and it knows it. Cue clips of it admitting it’s “not getting into heaven.” Of course, it’s only ever pretended to care about religion, and it probably doesn’t believe in heaven at all. Look at what’s… 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!