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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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Originalism is always fabrication
Ben Thompson, whose site Stratechery is interesting, well-written, and afflicted with tunnel vision about “the web” being collection of business deals, just posted this: The original web that we know and love was the human web; that’s why advertising was the preferred business model, and Google was the big winner. Nonsense. I can’t tell whether he means personal Continue reading
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Lifting the shroud
Jon Katz recently wondered “…why the idea of the value of helping others has vanished.” He surmised that perhaps “we no longer care who we listen to, and the people we listen to often show little concern for charity, people experiencing poverty, or the concept of empathy.” I don’t think charity or kindness have vanished, exactly. They’re Continue reading
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A quart of prevention…
When someone is suspected of carrying a contagious disease, they might be placed in quarantine. “Quarantine” has an unexpected sound for that context; doesn’t it remind you of quarter or quartile? Well it should! “Quarantine” is derived from the French “quarante,” which means “forty.” In English when we want to say something like about forty 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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Independence Declaration
Calendar-wise, we’re nearing the neighborhood of Independence Day in the US, and it occurs to me that France was the most important ally of the revolutionary American colonies — in fact, France provided the word “declaration,” as in Declaration of Independence. In typical US fashion, we celebrate that document’s signing on July 4, but it Continue reading
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Lexical ketchup burst
You’ve heard of “generation X.” It may or may not have come from a book, but a big reason everybody started using the term was Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was a very popular book about both the present and the future, and included a glossary of all 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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We don’t have kings because we can’t afford them
“Let me step away from current events for a moment and ask what may seem like an odd historical question: Why did absolute monarchy disappear from the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did republics or constitutional monarchies that basically functioned as republics become the norm?” “A large part of the answer Continue reading
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Re-righting history
“There’s a kind of desperation that clings to propaganda dressed as commentary—an ache to not only rewrite the record but to salt the earth where truth once stood. The Telegraph’s April 14 op-ed, ‘Trump has been proven right about pretty much everything,‘ by former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss, is one such piece.” –Joan Westenberg 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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