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I’m listening to a fascinating speaker right now. He’s considering how the serious and fantastical expectations of technological progress have been substantially unfulfilled. We enjoyed enormous progress through the 60s and seem to have stalled, replacing real productivity gains with theoretical improvements. He raises some fascinating points:
Biotech, Genomics, Alternative Energy, Artificial Intelligence? Progress has been too slow.
The common rejoinder is that computers have massively increased productivity. That’s a dubious argument. They create a tremendous amount of noise with which knowledge workers now must contend and an entire sub industry has arisen to cater to this problem without solving it. Computers also create an illusion that we have a better understanding of just about everything.
Read more »
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I got sick of looking at the same boring Kubrik wordpress theme, so I’ve installed a new theme, ClockWorkSimple by the mysterious ClockWorkBlogger. Thank you, whoever the heck you are).
The design is very simple, but it’s a lot cleaner/neater than what we had before. I’m tweaking it a bit here and there and hopefully will find a way to reintroduce some kind of “American” graphic or logo to better brand the site.
I’m also going to work on some search engine optimization (SEO) strategies so that we get more visitors in here looking at our daily content, instead of the visitors we have now who seem primarily to come from google image searches and random searches for posts that Matt labelled with absurdly-detailed category names.
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Hot off the presses. Amazing.
Release
Complaint
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Stephen Bernard of the Associated Press probably wouldn’t believe for one second that I could tell him, to the pound, the weight of all the rocks that fell off the Rocky Mountains during the past week. But he will — apparently without a scintilla of doubt — report that some company knows how much money was redeemed from the hedge fund industry in October.
Think about this for a second. Hedge funds are, overwhelmingly, private companies. Some of them report their performance data to various databases. Some firms even report asset data. But they don’t all report, and they mostly don’t supply monthly asset flow data…even to their own investors. Read more »
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My title is better. First off, Bond might be trying to revenge the death of Vesper, but in truth the most aggrieved party to the incident at Casino Royale are the Bond family jewels, which would, indeed, hold much malice.
Secondly, how in fuck does one rhyme a song using “solace”? There is no legitimate word that rhymes with solace, while “malice” offers several possibilities.
callous, challis, palace, phallus
My favorite Bond songs are from the earlier films - you only live twice, we have all the time in the world (from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), Thunderball (Tom Jones!), From Russia with Love, but the more recent ones have gone from good (A View to a Kill by Duran Duran) to awful (”I’ve got a license to kill and you know I’m going straight for your heart”).
I’m thinking the new bond song will have a fast pace and short staccato scansion.
She died, as she lived, forever callous
Ignoring the love of Bond’s substantial phallus
His heart, evermore, was a cold marble palace
dum! dum! dum! dum! dum!
The Scrotum of Malice
Tell me I’m wrong.