Ground Truth
In which Rat and his cousin are suspicious
Good time of day, humans!
There’s an interesting letter being circulated on the internets. (h/t: Jurassic Carl on Xitter)
Preparation for «sensitive events» looks suspicious in and by itself, but there’s another phrase that caught our eye.
Jokes aside, the phrase has an interesting history. It first became widely used in early 70ies, mostly in relation to the rapid development of remote sensing and satellite observation technologies:
Dictionary definition being quite innocent:
Information acquired by direct observation rather than by inference.
(wiktionary)
…it should also be noted the phrase is commonly used in military parlance.
Since around 2014, it’s rapidly rising again, this time in relation to AI technologies. While it can be argued this is only natural (as AI field absorbed people and knowledge from signal processing), a part of me is still suspicious about military connections of the phrase.
Returning to our beans: in our parts, ground coffee typically costs some 20…25% less than coffee beans from the same producer. Would anyone put in more work for less revenue if it was exactly the same? I don’t think so.
Perhaps ground thing isn’t quite the real thing.
Ground coffee is cheaper than beans? Haven't drunk coffee in many years, and did not realize that. I don't even know if stores here in small town US have beans. What could be, is that beans keep fresh longer. Ground coffee must be sealed. Once opened it could lose its flavor quicker. Just an idea. But then again, the same thing goes for diesel and regular fuel. Fuel is cheaper than diesel although it is more refined. One should think the opposite.
The thing-grinding process can conceal the use of thing-stretcher and thing-substitute. With coffee beans, that can be fairly benign, e.g. chicory. Truth-stretcher and truth-substitute, however...