#boomersticks
(Dives for cover)
They are funny things. The first birthday present I bought my wife was one. But these days most new ones require a WiFi connection so they can roam around recording your house layout and what's in it for sale to advertisers and other stalkers.
Terrorists may or may not deserve due process.
The real reason they get due process is because you and I deserve due process.
If any government is allowed to kill people outside combat, government officials will use it to kill people they find inconvenient. Maybe theyll bother to plant a weapon a bleeding heart with a camera is around. Maybe they will just brazen it out.
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
My father used to drive a new car into the ground every four years. I guess he could afford it, but I can't! And a little preventative maintainence goes a long way.
Hit by a tree though, that was seriously unlucky!
What is your new phone, if you don't mind us asking?
I'm not much of a car guy myself, but here are some really easy things:
Change air filters
Change oil (I use a kit that sucks it in and out through the dipstick hole, quicker and less mess)
Other easy things I have done, but usually bribe my BIL to do:
Change oil filter
Change spark plugs
Check brake pads
And yeah that's the limit of my automotive skills!
Anyone else?
Once you've learned one programming language, its much easier to pick up a second, third and fourth.
I would recommend #python because its easy and teaches some good habits, but other people will have their own preferences.
Why We Should Sell Citizenship on eBay
I have a couple of friends and more relatives who are ticket-clippers in visa-mills. Academics, in other words.
The higher education we sell in this country isn't worth a damn compared to good universities in Asia, and is more expensive, but it comes with the promise of a slice of rights to the country's natural resources, and its particular political, administrative and justice systems build up by our ancestors.
People are willing to pay for a slice of the fruit of that, and to get away from the alternative traditions of their homelands. No judgement. My wife did just that, so did many of my friends.
But then they complain that the exact things they paid to leave behind are following them here in record numbers.
"Where does Australia find these people???" an Arab friend once asked me in horror.
"Diluting out" minor shareholders by management recklessly selling new shares is an offence, and company directors have gone to jail for it.
But there are no such consequences for the diluting out of working-class citizens by politicians, by academics, and by abusive and incompetent corporate managers who can't retain local staff and have to depend on "bonded labour" immigrants on temporary visas. The whole system is a ponzi scam, and rife with waste, fraud, sexual coercion and vote-banking. I don't judge the buyers of citizenship, but I certainly judge the (elite, well-connected and treasonous) sellers!
Ancient Byzantium used to recruit its Varangian Guard by essentially selling positions, and citizenship with it. Mediaeval Catholicism was rife with simony, and Early Modern Spain bought and sold basically all government posts. I used to think this was terrible, but I slowly learned the present system in Western countries is nothing more than a wasteful, corrupt, politicised caricature of its ancient equivalents.
An investor's loyalty to his investment is nothing particularly strong or admirable, but it is a stronger attachment to a homeland than the attitudes indoctrinated into new immigrants by the institutions they are required to please. And the present system openly favours criminals, corrupt officials of defeated regimes, and the spoiled children of bribe-sucking bureaucrats, who have the time, the lack of shame, and the contacts required to find the easy (non-education) paths in.
Cut out the middlemen.
End the waste, the corruption, the sexual coercion and the vote-banking. Turn citizenship into an alienable form of property, and allow people to sell theirs on the market IF they have arranged legal residence elsewhere.
If policymakers want to recruit particular types of foreigners, they can offer grants and subsidies to qualifying fireigners to purchase citizenship. Skilled workers, romantic partners, persecuted LGBTIQ2Ss etc etc.
And any local citizen who is willing to sell out probably isn't much of a citizen anyway. I wouldn't sell, but a junkie with a statistical life expectancy of seven years might like to get residence in a cheap-drugs country and move there in return for payment. So might various reverse-Nationalist ideologues of the sort that infest politics and academia.
One in, one out. Win-win.
#controversial #UnpopularOpinion #migration #politics
I'm going to vote for the Alexandrine Empire. Brought distant cultures into contact, created new and vigorous ones, and imploded in no more than a generation.
All empires should do that. The imperial equivalent of dying a hero before seeing yourself become the villain.
I don't think Nostr's relay system scales well enough to become the next Usenet/FB/X/Instagram/Reddit/StackExchange. I expect this will limit participation in Nostr to small-ish communities built around lists of related relays and client applications.
And I think that's a great thing.
It will still be more diverse and thought-provoking than most of its rivals.
If UBI was more than 50% of the median household's income, then I'd agree with you.
I can't imagine that being the case, however. Typical Western governments' tax takes are no more than 25-50% of GDP, in total. And wars, whores and vanity projects eat before social welfare of any sort.
I want to see obese, spiteful, blue-haired petty tyrants driving for Uber, because UBI gave the policians an alibi for cutting them loose. I daresay UBI will never happen, because the public service is such a powerful vote-buying machine. But it is within the realm of the possible...
1. Build one of these:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
2. Use it to ferry materials to build my Orbital Castle of DOOM.
3. Shitpost on #nostr from space, while patting a chameleon.
I agree 100% with your argument, but not with your conclusion.
The present, labrynthine social welfare system already provides the state MORE levers over vulnerable people than #ubi.
Fair call.
I can say from experience that with a woman around (even one their mother's age), I never had to pull any of the guys up for dress, bearing or forgetting to shave. Few stupid pranks, too.
But it was also true that they were less team-oriented with a woman around, and underperformed relative to when there wasn't.
I agree with this, but I also admit it is completely illogical and comes from our culture.
There were a few women who I trained with when I was in, who were good soldiers, and who I would never feel right ordering to stay in safety.
I would also have felt worse seeing them hurt if it came to that, though.
Reading Gary's posts with interest.