Month: April 2016

Desert irrigation

A series of canals brought the water, trapped underground, to the areas where it was needed; anything left was stored in surface reservoirs. To help keep it moving, chimneys were excavated above the canals in the shape of corkscrewing funnels. These funnels let wind into the canals, which forced the water through the system.

Blandly

so good.

BLANDLY IS A FULL-SERVICE BLANDING AGENCY. We specialize in bland identity, bland development, bland strategy, blandbuilding, bland positioning, digital blanding, fully integrated blanding campaigns, bland UI/UX design, and bland environments.

Union endgame

If, nationally, this is the endgame for unions, a lot still hinges on how that endgame will be played. It’s useful to think in the brutally reductive terms of Wall Street. The gains to be made from the legacy business of picket lines are limited, but there is still plenty of capital built up for unions to spend in the legislative arena. That effort has already started. Not long ago, policy-makers talked about raising the minimum wage by $1 or $2 an hour. Now New York and California have approved a $15 hourly minimum wage, and Fight For $15 has gone national.

Rise of the trollbot

trolling will soon be automated, and in the case of gamergate may have already happened: Welcome to 2018 or so. Half your social media friends are probably robots – and they’re probably the half that you like the most. Every so often one of the remaining humans gets driven off the Internet thanks to a furious 24/7 Twitter assault that might be a zeitgeist moment, or might just be a bot assault. And you can’t even tell if what you think is the zeitgeist is entirely manufactured by one guy with an overheating graphics card and a Mission.

2023-02-03: Scott Alexander considers these rampant fears and concludes that they won’t be a big deal

Overall I think it will happen to a very limited degree or not at all:

  1. There Are Already Plenty Of Social Anti-Bot Filters
  2. …And Technological Anti-Bot Filters
  3. Fear Of Backlash Will Limit Adoption
  4. Propagandabots Spreading Disinformation Is Probably The Opposite Of What You Should Worry About
  5. Realistically This Will All Be Crypto Scams
  6. I Do Think This Might Decrease Serendipitous Friendship, Though
  7. You Can Solve For The Equilibrium

Ching Shih

Though the name under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80k men. In comparison, the famed Blackbeard commanded 4 ships and 300 pirates within the same century. As a result, Ching Shih is known as one of the most successful pirates in known history.

Tax prep is cruel and unusual punishment

have the IRS, which will be evaluating these people’s returns anyway, simply do all the math for most of the simple tax returns. We’re not talking about returns that would legitimately make use of deductions; we’re talking about very simple tax returns, which is what most people have filled out by tax preparers or tax software anyway. Now, this is usually where someone will make the obvious point: the government doesn’t deserve to be entrusted with this math. And, hey, I take that point seriously. The government has certainly shown its capacity to lie and deceive. But so has the tax-prep industry. Intuit has been guilty of all kinds of underhanded attempts to keep people from being able to file for free. They are proven deceivers, too.

this how taxes work in civilized countries. i hope this passes.