100 suns

If there’s a nazi at a table and ten other people sitting around the table talking to them, then there are eleven nazis sitting at the table. ...

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. ...

The median net worth of an individual in the US is about $200,000. Elon Musk is about two million times as wealthy. He has already bought power in the US and he is now planning to buy power in the UK. ...

If I was a financial parasite who had become very rich by extracting wealth from a society, I'd be a bit worried about current demographic trends. Birth rates are very, very low: population decline in many wealthy countries is imminent or already happening. And population decline, other things being equal, means relatively more old people: people who need care and financial support coming from a relatively smaller number of young people. What this smells like, if it continues, is either econo...

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This is the end game. The parasites have sucked so much money and social capital from the societies they feed on that they are likely to collapse. So the vampire techbros, plutocrats and would-be plutocrats have stopped pretending: they are now feeding without restraint, trying to extract as much money as they can, as quickly as they can, before their hosts die. Do they have a plan for what they'll do then, once their food source is gone? Probably not: probably they will start feeding on eac...

Surprisingly it seems that pervasive gun ownership can improve the quality of healthcare. ...

Less than half as long as the Roman empire. Less than half as long as the Roman republic. ...

populist noun: a person who offers simple, appealing, non-solutions to complex, unappealing problems. Example: Inflation is high: it's the immigrants. xenophobe noun: a person who fears or hates foreigners or foreign things. Example: Inflation is high: it's the immigrants. Impose high tariffs on nasty foreign goods. The result is high inflation: everyone gets poorer as prices climb to cover the tariffs. Well, everyone except plutocrats who own large corporations who are doing very nicely...

I've written before about the cold war. I argued that the last war the US won was the second world war, that the cold war did not end in 1991, and in fact was not over and that it did not look like the west (meaning, for all practical purposes, the US) was winning it. I think we can call it now. The cold war is over: Russia won. ...

I should have learned long ago. If you come across someone who seriously believes in magic, run far away. Don't 'give them a chance', don't assume that the contagion might somehow only have destroyed part of their brain: run. ...

So Trump has appointed Musk to some government position. Let's hope he does as well there as he did at Twitter X his vanity domain, eh? ...

Hahahahahahahaha. ...

I wish people would just shut up with all the 'Kamala Harris is to blame, because ...' shit: if, when offered a choice between a candidate who promises very loudly and clearly to uphold democracy and a fascist, you pick the fascist, then you are a fascist1. It doesn't matter that Harris was not perfect: she was far from perfect, but she wasn't a fascist, and Trump is. Kamala Harris is not to blame for the awkward fact that there are more than seventy million fascists in the USA. Shut the fuck...

When I was young, I can remember my grandparents (born in the early 20th century) saying that talking to Germans was always awkward: you always wanted to ask them what did they do in the war? In the coming years talking to Americans will be just the same: everyone will want to ask, who did they vote for? Were they, are they, fascists? And they will answer no, of course they didn't vote for him, of course they're not racists, not fascists. But about half of them were, about half of them are. ...

everyone will agree which of the two Joker films is better. And it's going to be Joker: folie à deux. ...

It's funny that people are drawing exactly the wrong lesson from ClownStrike. The lesson people draw: 'Windows shit, Linux/macOS wonderful', followed by the inevitable stupid fight about which exactly of Linux and macOS is the most wonderful. The lesson people should draw: 'if you allow the clown privileged access to your systems you are a fool who should not be running a brick'. 'Ah', pipe up the chorus of smug neckbeard *nix weenies, 'but you see we never do that, because the architecture o...

298 of the Fortune 500, 538 of the Fortune 1000, 8 of the top 10 financial services firms, 7 of the top 10 manufacturers, 8 of the top 10 food & beverage companies, 8 of the top 10 auto companies, 43 of the 50 U.S. states, 6 of the top 10 healthcare providers and 8 of the top 10 technology firms ... use a product which can automatically download an update which will render their systems catatonic1. Or, you know, an update which gives a bad person free access to them: rendering the systems ...

whether what happened on Saturday were the first shots of the second American civil war. But I think they probably were. ...

If Biden were to order Trump to be assassinated, he would be immune from prosecution. If he were to order the assassination of any or all of the Supreme court judges he would be immune from prosecution. I'm not saying he should do these things. But he could, and doing so might be better than the alternative. The rule of law in the USA is dead. In a few months, democracy in the USA will probably be dead. It's over. ...

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. ...

I started off loving this: the first couple of episodes were just brilliantly clever and although the kind of timescales aren't plausible for real three-body stellar systems, you can forgive them that. Then it just dropped the ball by introducing magic: how do the aliens talk to us? Oh, right, they have superluminal communications technology. Which is magic, not science, and if it did exist would mean they could send information into the past and thus solve the prediction problem they have. ...

So I have an iPad and an iPhone. Both are running the most recent version of iOS / iPadOS. The phone is a few feet away from me, on charge, and has lots of signal. They are signed in to the same Apple ID. I am in a hotel in a major city in a first-world country. This is not some weird left-field scenario. Using the iPhone as a hotspot for the iPad works ... mostly. Like, quite often you have to reboot one or both of them. It almost never works for long enough to watch a movie. Often you...

Extremism is the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to: 1 negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or 2 undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or 3 intentionally create a permissive environment for others to achieve the results in (1) or (2). So that's the tory party then, right? ...

want to set someone's head on fire? Because I did. ...

Throw the fucking switch ...

I was driven away, let me remind you, by things like sickness, hate and the death of truth. ...

He's just, you know, fascist adjacent ...

Californian regulations forbid insurers from using the latest climate models to set prices, since protection would become more costly. Premiums must be based on the average payout over the past 20 years, rather than the latest science. Shying away from ambiguity is understandable. Sticking your head in the sand is plain foolish. – The Economist, 15th July 2023 ...

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. – John Rogers ...