In the elder days of Art Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part, For the Gods see everywhere. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow In his pithy and spot-on book, On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt writes about the above lines of poetry, “The point of these lines is clear. In the old days, craftsmen did not cut corners… These craftsmen did not relax their thoughtful self-discipline even with respect …
TikTok Tells The Story of Its Satisfied Customers on TV
TikTok's rising popularity is a dangerous threat to national security. TikTok must be banned. That's the conclusion of lawmakers and university presidents who want to restrict access to the site. These lawmakers and academic leaders fear the Chinese firm that owns TikTok will collude with the Chinese government and use the data it collects from members to conduct misinformation campaigns. Since November, more …
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United Auto Workers Is Battling the Culture of “Corporate Greed”
American workers are tired and tired of being overlooked while struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, corporate profits are soaring to unheard-of heights. According to the Economic Policy Institute, profits at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis almost doubled between 2013 and 2022, totaling $250 billion. Is that money trickling down to the workers in the automotive plants? Not exactly. Over the past four …
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Apple Answers To Mother Nature
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature and Apple wouldn't dream of doing such a thing. The company mines precious metals to use in its products and creates a non-renewable waste stream from these same products, and runs massive data centers that suck electricity all day every day, nevertheless, Apple is aligned with Mother Nature. That's what this new piece of branded content says, and who are we to argue with the …
The Valley’s High Priests Want AI Allegiance and Adoption
The Valley's hype machine has been in full grind mode since the dawn of AI as a mass market tool. Since the start of 2023, I've seen a lot of over-the-top nonsense masquerading as product promotion, but what I saw last week in venture capitalist Mark Andreesen's verbose defense of the technology, is unprecedented. This is no longer PR or promotion. It's religion. The stakes here are high. The opportunities are …
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Sky High on AI
AI. Have two letters in combination ever received the hype, press, and speculation behind them that AI presently enjoys? One has to wonder what's so special about the latest shiny object and exactly who stands to gain the most by seeing artificial intelligence take off. The pace of AI-related product releases and promotions since November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public has been brisk. Take …
How Much Do You Really Know About Monosodium Glutamate?
Americans pour mountains of salt onto their food. We also reflexively say, "No, thank you," to Monosodium Glutamate, which could lower one's salt intake. We've been saying no to MSG for decades, but why? According to one of MSG's leading manufacturers—Ajinomoto—MSG's bad reputation is both undeserved and rooted in racism. In the 1960s, a wave of anti‐Asian xenophobia created a nationwide panic about MSG. This …
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Keep Bastrop Boring
Bastrop County is a fast-growing neighbor to Travis County—the home of Austin, the University of Texas, the state capitol, Austin FC, Austin City Limits, Oracle, Tesla, and so on. Bastrop is also directly downriver from Tesla's new world headquarters and car-making factory. When Elon Musk moved from California to Texas, his Boring Company quickly set up shop in rural Bastrop County, and currently has a permit to …
