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Jun. 19th, 2025 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pcbPratchett had a fun idea of suggesting a state that was 'opposite'. So opposite, it didn't even come into the usual spectrum of whateveritwas he was talking about.
There's a concept car by Mercedes and Avatar, the Vision AVTR, I think it is. There seemed to be a secret fingerprint reader to gain access to the vehicle. It's in the wheel arch.
This struck me as so cleverly dumb that it was on the opposite side of the coin in which clever and dumb are but one side, yadda yadda yadda.
But.
If the idea is anti-clever (is that so sharp you'll cut yourself, perhaps?) anti-clever needs anti-dumb to balance out the clever/dumb continuum on the flip side of that bloody coin Pratchett was on about.
Anti-dumb. Is this Timothy Dexter territory?
Dexter lived at the end of the 18th century; while undereducated, he became a very successful businessman. Somehow, he married a rich widow (twice his own age, at 32), then bought depreciated currency which was then paid for at face value at the end of the American Civil War. Rivals who wanted to bankrupt him suggested he ship warming pans to the Caribbean – where they were sold as molasses ladles for the sugar industry. He was convinced to ship woollen gloves to the Polynesian islands – where they were traded on for sale in Siberia. He sent a load of stray cats to... Indonesia, I think it was. They were having a problem with rats. 'Ker-ching'. His Coals to Newcastle scheme also paid well as there was a mining strike at the time and an accidental whalebone stockpile fed into the corset industry, again at a profit.
I'm not sure.
I'm going to have to tinker with the possibilities though. The square root of -1, Euler's Constant and zero might have to be employed: e i e i 0...
There's a concept car by Mercedes and Avatar, the Vision AVTR, I think it is. There seemed to be a secret fingerprint reader to gain access to the vehicle. It's in the wheel arch.
This struck me as so cleverly dumb that it was on the opposite side of the coin in which clever and dumb are but one side, yadda yadda yadda.
But.
If the idea is anti-clever (is that so sharp you'll cut yourself, perhaps?) anti-clever needs anti-dumb to balance out the clever/dumb continuum on the flip side of that bloody coin Pratchett was on about.
Anti-dumb. Is this Timothy Dexter territory?
Dexter lived at the end of the 18th century; while undereducated, he became a very successful businessman. Somehow, he married a rich widow (twice his own age, at 32), then bought depreciated currency which was then paid for at face value at the end of the American Civil War. Rivals who wanted to bankrupt him suggested he ship warming pans to the Caribbean – where they were sold as molasses ladles for the sugar industry. He was convinced to ship woollen gloves to the Polynesian islands – where they were traded on for sale in Siberia. He sent a load of stray cats to... Indonesia, I think it was. They were having a problem with rats. 'Ker-ching'. His Coals to Newcastle scheme also paid well as there was a mining strike at the time and an accidental whalebone stockpile fed into the corset industry, again at a profit.
I'm not sure.
I'm going to have to tinker with the possibilities though. The square root of -1, Euler's Constant and zero might have to be employed: e i e i 0...
no subject
Date: 2025-06-19 11:25 am (UTC)Man, my opinion of Mercedes nosedived the last time Owlfather had one, but this stunt takes the biscuit.
Along with the idea of a secret anything being made public knowledge by promo materials, of course. And along with the implicit idea of the wheel arch being so clever a hiding place that nobody's ever thought of hiding anything there before, of course. I'd just finished a run along the river one day when I came back to the trailhead and saw a similarly-inclined guy fishing his key fob out from where he'd stashed it on the front tyre of his Audi. (Some banter ensued; I think I remarked that he had guts leaving the key on the actual vehicle; he replied that he'd have to keep an eye out for me in future since I knew the hiding place; I replied that nah, I'd had an Audi but sold it because it wasn't my thing.) I.e. half the world is already using the wheel hub to hide stuff, plus why does a fingerprint reader have to be secret at all if you need to supply the correct fingerprint to use it?
I'll shut up now. But yeah. That whole idea goes beyond dumb and out the other side to... whatever lies below the equivalent of the infrared region on the smart-to-stupid spectrum.
no subject
Date: 2025-06-20 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-20 12:30 pm (UTC)It's such a bad idea that I'm wondering if it was misdirection. Yeah. 'wheel arch' and 'sensitive hardware' just don't go together. And I'm counting my fingers in the latter category😄
no subject
Date: 2025-06-20 01:58 pm (UTC)