Quotations
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The lost gatekeepers and the watchers
This is a followup to a previous post, where I complained that the internet information environment shifts a lot of work from the creation/dissemination side to the consumer/user side. Walter Benjamin offered another much richer analysis in his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He lived long before the Continue reading
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Weird disconnect
Tesla is not doing well at its core business of selling new cars. as [Indranil Ghosh](notes), in 2025 their deliveries fell “8.6% to 1.6 million vehicles.” That’s the second year in a row that sales dropped. However, “The sales decline hasn’t affected Tesla’s stock price.” What’s going on? Ghosh suggests that Wall Street investors are Continue reading
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Agreed
“…offering serious policy advice to the current U.S. government is like preaching to baboons: You won’t get heard over the hooting, and even if they did hear, they wouldn’t understand.” –Paul Krugman Continue reading
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The rat in the house
“January 6, 2021 was the most shameful day in American history. It should live in infamy, as should the traitor who refused to accept the election results and incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol — Donald J. Trump.“ Continue reading
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This explains a lot
I’ve often been baffled by economists, who comport themselves as super-smart academics who have everything figured out, but in practice make claims that are absurd, predictions that are incredibly, obviously stupid and wrong, and analyses built on unreasonable, imagined bases. In today’s post, Paul Krugman (an economist with the distinction of having won the fake Continue reading
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156 Years Ago
“I submit that this question [of immigration] should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible. “Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the Continue reading
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Oh, right, “AI”
“…the world’s shadiest art dealer… is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent. Which is just, you know, stupid. It’s like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive.“ Continue reading
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Sometimes it speaks the truth
“…a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.” –the orange baby Continue reading
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Remember Sarah Beckstrom
Sarah Beckstrom was a National Guard member from Summersville, West Virginia. She died from bullet wounds while deployed to Washington, D.C. “She swore an oath to defend the Constitution. Donald Trump violated it to put her there. She should never have been deployed at all. A federal judge ruled last week that Trump’s activation of the National Continue reading
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I’ve visited Kansas…
…but I didn’t get the impression it was the sort of place where the Secretary of State would have to issue a public reminder to a newspaper that it wasn’t Election Day in the state, or that Kansans can’t vote in elections in other states. 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 Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but 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.