Incompetence of the powerful
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Lest we forget
At McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: LEST WE FORGET THE HORRORS: AN UNENDING CATALOG OF TRUMP’S CRUELTIES, COLLUSIONS, CORRUPTIONS, AND CRIMES. by Emily Greenberg and Cliff Mayotte Continue reading
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Business Idiots
“Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arms-length, and effectively anything built at scale quickly becomes distanced from both the customer and laborer. This disconnection — or alienation — sits at the center of almost every problem I’ve ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of… Continue reading
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Which amendment was that?
ICE gestapo monsters left a 12-year-old standing alone, unaccompanied, on a sidewalk after snatching their adult companion. It seems to me this sort of thing could escalate into exactly what that amendment about “a well regulated militia” was supposed to be about. Not good. Continue reading
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The NYT appears to be wrong again
The New York Times story about the orange baby’s declaration of victory over the Houthis in Yemen is “provably unreliable in at least two ways: the timeline, and the claimed involvement of Trump.” So is Maggie Haberman just a chump who gets played constantly? Or maybe it’s all on purpose. Continue reading
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“Like a business,” they said
The idea that the US should be “run like a business” has been popular with the republic party for decades. Like many of the slogans they parrot, the actual thinkers in the party almost certainly don’t agree with it, but recognize it as a convenient talking point that will convince their base. Now they’ve got… Continue reading
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Teslas are obsolete, overpriced junk
Tesla is not keeping up with the competition, not by a long shot. The real competition in electric vehicles seems to be led by companies in China and South Korea. Tesla, which has always been known for inferior build quality and doesn’t update its offerings very often. The Model X is a decade old. The… Continue reading
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There are jobs, and then there are jobs
The regime of the orange baby, and the baby itself, seem to believe (or at least say, which isn’t the same thing for it) that making products — toys, for example — arbitrarily more expensive for US consumers is a good thing. Maybe, the baby spitballs, it will mean that “the jobs” move to the… Continue reading
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Nearly all startups fail
Feckless liar and scam artist Musk has purported to be running the DOGE fake department like a tech-startup founder. Fun fact: the only reason Musk has ever been called a “founder” of a startup is because he sued the actual founders and part of his demands were to be referred to as a founder. Anyway,… Continue reading
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Hey here’s an idea
I realize that “ideas” and “thinking” are not features of the current regime in America — or should I say “Amerika” — but here’s one anyway. If trade deficits are such a crucial thing, maybe review an industry where we have a big trade surplus: education. Thousands of foreign students want to come here to… Continue reading
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Did you know…
The Nobel Prize in Economics is not a Nobel prize. It’s a fake created by the Swedish central bank in 1968. It “honors” Alfred Nobel, but the Nobel committee does not award a prize in economics. I believe that’s because they do not consider economics an actual science. And neither should we. Milton Friedman, who… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.