Tag: culture
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politics and anti-politics
The cluster of wars in Great Britain and Ireland between 1639 and 1660 are often called “civil wars,” because they were fought by subjects of Charles I in the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I prefer the more poetical title, Wars of the Three Kingdoms. But I also think of them, though no one…
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Governing AI Is the Least of Our Problems
This week I attended the Seattle University Ethics & Tech Conference; a half-day affair with a focus on “the legal and political frameworks shaping AI governance”. Just the kind of boundary spanning problem that I love to sink my teeth into. Easily the best conference of the year you didn’t attend. For me, it felt…
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Psychic morphine and the scourge of artificial nostalgia
The morning of January 20, 1961 was cold but clear in Washington, D.C.. The temperature began in the teens and never rose much higher. There is something telling in the fact that the United States installs its head of state not in the bloom of spring or the harvest of fall, but in the dead…
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Pink Glue
In the spring of 1972, two revolutions met in the same sentence. One had marched and shouted and chanted. One had done none of these things. By a vote of 84-8, the U. S. Senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United…
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Installation
In the summer of 1971, with the Southern air thick and humid in Richmond, Virginia, 344 days after Milton Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, beneath the slow rotation of a ceiling fan a partner at the white-shoe law firm Hunton & Williams typed a…
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motd: 20250412
Darling, someone’s tampering with your freedom again. Pour another drink.
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wake
You wake up in the middle of your life. Thirty tabs open. A hundred thousand dollars in debt. Three-day shipping and nothing left to want. You’re not free. You’re on a payment plan for a life you don’t even remember signing up for. The voice in your head? That’s not your voice. That’s the ad…
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chores
AI+robotics should make everyone’s life easier by doing the things in our lives that are necessary, time consuming, and annoying; basically, as the saying goes, they should be doing our chores so we can have more time to enjoy our hobbies. Chore is one of those odd words who’s meaning emerges from some kind of…
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dragon rules
May you live dragon-free
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an actual quote from an imaginary conversation
My issue with you is not whether or not you are going to hell, rather, it is about how long you are taking to get there. I don’t care to save souls from damnation. If I’m honest I never have, and that was probably the sliver that opened the door for my departure from organized…