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You might know these guys
How quickly the veneer of the US being anything special at all fades. Now that we have secret police, we seem to have no problem recruiting sufficient thugs who are happy to mask up and anonymously disappear anybody without any of that bothersome “due process” stuff. And many of the disappeared are shipped to our Continue reading
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It figures
There is a competition called the International Math Olympiad (IMO). It’s an international competition for high school students. It consists of six questions that competitors have to answer within a time limit. There are only six questions, but these are extremely difficult questions, of course. At least at the level of excellent, but pre-university mathematicians. Continue reading
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Blaming
Politics in the US seems to be more about nonsensical blaming than it used to be. I think it’s because once they’re elected, the greedheads and powerheads just assume that the rest of us are stupid, and will just accept whatever tripe comes out of their mouths. This may be at least partly due to Continue reading
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Back to the future
I was recently struggling with Yet Another bloated, unwieldy commercial application when I suddenly remembered the Unix “philosophy.” It’s been codified lots of times, but maybe most succinctly by Peter Salus: – Write programs that do one thing and do it well. – Write programs to work together. – Write programs to handle text streams, Continue reading
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And then…
The orange baby is coming to the end of its life. Maybe not immediately, but it’s an elderly white male that reportedly makes bad diet and exercise choices, and although it’s secretive, it’s in the public eye enough for people to spot warning signs. It has repeatedly dangled the possibility of “a third term,” but Continue reading
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History continues
I had never heard of Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas before, but what’s going on there is yet another case of large scale immorality and incompetence. In this case by the regime of the orange baby, but it’s been going on a lot longer. In the linked article, Haines Eason asks: “Can you name 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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Business as usual
“As with Musk, what is striking about {Sam} Altman is not that he is a rich guy who is concerned with increasing the wealth of rich guys. That is to be expected. What leaps out to me is the extent to which these men who fancy themselves visionaries are actually sunk neck-deep in the dreary Continue reading
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Keeping tally
It’s July 7, 2025, and the US has concentration camps, masked secret police/gestapo, an executive above the law, military occupation, book banning, arrest and detention for expressing opinions, and abandonment of due process. Any questions? Continue reading
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What kind of rope do you stock in your store?
“…contemporary capitalism has become indistinguishable from Marx’s critique of it. The system that anti-leftist reactionaries claim to defend now exhibits every pathology that socialist theory predicted: extreme inequality, regulatory capture, the subordination of democratic governance to capital accumulation, the treatment of human needs as secondary to profit maximization.“ –Mike Brock Remember that Karl Marx quote 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.
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com