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Sentencing
The American slang phrase “throw the book at [someone]” means to apply the maximum legal punishment. The most common usage is something like this: “the judge really threw the book at Ralph; he won’t get out of prison for twenty years.” But really, which book is that — the one getting thrown? The legal tomes Continue reading
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Not just the Principia Mathematica
From Bertrand Russel in 1940: “The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and Continue reading
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Doing it over and over again
A lot of human experience, especially the experiences we seem to choose, involves doing the same thing over and over again. It’s a dream of many people to start their own business, and whether it involves cooking, painting, installing closets, fixing cars, moving furniture, or you-name-it, a small business is often (not always) mostly about 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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The intoxication of exuberant verbosity
“A sophistiocal rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.” That’s what Benjamin Disraieli said about William Gladstone in 1878. Decades before Disraeli and Gladstone rose to prominence 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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Darkness at the edge of town
E.B. White used to write a column called Running to the Country (or it might have been One Man’s Meat, or maybe that was one issue). White’s been described as getting frustrated by “silly questions” sent by readers (“silly questions” is my description, not his). If they asked for additional details about some experience he’d Continue reading
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Have a day
Wouldn’t it be nice if English words, once they meant something specific, just retained that meaning? Well, it might be nice, but it definitely wouldn’t be “nice.” The word “nice,” over the many, many years the word has existed, had these meanings: silly, lascivious, ostentatious, scrupulous, fastidious, polite, respectable, cowardly, lazy, delicate, strange, shy, undecided, Continue reading
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Next time for sure
If you embark on a “wild goose chase”, you’re trying to do something that’s probably not going to work. But where did that phrase come from? Most people assume that it would be very difficult to catch a wild goose, so the idea of chasing one is foolish and pointless. You’ll even see that explanation Continue reading
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Never before…
As everybody knows, just in the past few years the proliferation of new media means that more and more people are doomed to be “unable to learn anything, to know anything well and to concentrate their minds upon anything.” It’s brain rot, that’s what it is, and it’s something that has never happened before. No, 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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