Democracy and transparency, folks

Wagner rules the roost, but the CIA has sent in mercs to start beefing. Africa's warlord period continues.

Ukie defenses doing poorly on the Russian rather than the DPR/LPR front due to a combination of low manpower reserves and corruption preventing mining. NATO is responding by sending advisors and hoping they can hang on long enough for the somnolent president to get re-elected and send in the troops. This is on the heels of Germany reimposing conscription.

It's not looking good amigos.

The precedent set in the Mackey case eschews any limiting principle on how the law can be applied. Any “disinformation” — that is, any untrue statement, even crude jokes, like jesting that Michelle Obama is a man, or that [insert politician] is really an alien lizard in a human skinsuit — so long as it might deter someone from voting, is a potential crime. Even the mild suggestion that voting is irrational, a belief long held by many mainstream political scientists, could count as a criminal act under this reading of Section 241. This broadening of scope is precisely the point.

I've told multiple people in my life why I consider voting to be not only irrational but immoral. I have likely posted as much multiple times upon this very site. Ever since the PATRIOT act, I knew this day would come. It's just a matter of time until libertarians and anarchists will not be tolerated by the state any longer. The edifice of lies the regime rests upon demands it.

Throws in soviet style snitch incentives. Their society will go straight to hell shortly.

Sic transit

I've heard this lie before. Sure, it starts with a "no fly zone", but you inevitably get sucked in.

I’m not really sure what to do here. How do you review a book that has a glaring omission, but also its author has written an essay called Here’s Why I Like Glaring Omissions And Think Everyone Should Have Them? Is it dishonest? Some sort of special super-meta-honesty? How many stars do you take off? Nothing in my previous history of book-reviewing has prepared me for this question.

Of course he's unprepared for reality, being a "rationalist/bayesian". They deny the implications of the Frame problem, which is their core error. I should write a blog post about this; it's why racism and all the concerns discussed are straight-up spooks. You might be able to walk a mile in another mans shoes, but you can't walk with his feet.

An absolutely fascinating defense. "Someone else might not be able to commit this crime, so we should be allowed to do it" is one of the weirdest defences I have ever heard.

Hey, it worked for the TBTF banks...

"At bottom, [the Internet Archive’s] fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book. But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction."

Oops, guess your local library needs to burn their microfiche collection! Also, emulator enthusiasts up against the wall.

Much of this Skunking occurs due to a lack of shared reading experiences. Once upon a time, most Anglos understood enough french to get the meaning of 'nonplussed', for the same reason we understood "a piece of work" to be a reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet. It is through reading the same books that we picked up on the same context clues leading to the same understanding of word meanings.

Metaphors, advanced vocab, jargon and turns of phrase are the linguistic equivalent of data compression. Usage of such is the primary difference between the sort of English you hear on TV (third grade or lower reading level) versus what is spoken by the literate.

Much of modern life actually relies on this implicitly. Without shared literary perspective, interpretation of the law becomes entirely arbitrary (see: sovcits). Many such cases.

True fluency requires a good degree of cultural assimilation. Some are disturbed by how this smuggles in a number of biases, but this is unavoidable. Every culture has to live somewhere and as such has its own set of "corn-pone opinions". When in Rome...

I'm not sure whether our ongoing revolution in communications technology is accelerating or arresting the rate of skunking. The world is increasingly adopting the English language and American norms while largely abandoning the literary heritage that built both. My gut instinct would be towards acceleration, but I am unsure anyone's seriously studied the topic.

Anyone paying attention knows the US won't take "yes" for an answer; like all other democracies, they aren't agreement capable. Showing weakness of any kind is just chum in the water to these sharks. Also, if they really have a bug up their ass about ya, they're just gonna go terminator on your ass and will not stop ever until you are dead. As such there is no rational reason for anyone to ever comply with US demands internationally. Make them pay for every inch with blood.

How much do you want to bet slack and discord are doing the exact same shit?

Most of the commentariat is upset about this 360 head spinning (e.g. regime uncertainty). Look, if you haven't figured out democracies aren't "agreement capable" you simply aren't paying attention. The red man knew back then: white man speak with forked tongue. Welcome to the reservation.

D of Commerce wants anybody who runs code on behalf of others to make their customers do the full KYC anal probe. E.G. the entire hosting and "as a service" industry. "The government knowing my entire customer book couldn't possibly be used against me, right???" While this will catch guys who launder their shady bitcoin money into MRR for their SAAS from "ghost subscriptions", it'll impose crushing costs on the industry as a whole.

Surprising, given the outright hostility to free association coming from every other organ of state. I'm sure there's some DEI dingbat out there pimping the idea that enserfing us is somehow worker protection.

I always put it like this. If modern medicine did what it said on the tin, there wouldn't be "alternative medicine". The "closer to the truth" answer here isn't Scott's obviously cornpone opinion here, but this:

80% of medicine (mainstream or otherwise) is straight-up useless; this is because when it comes to conning the gullible & desperate, it's first-come, first-served. 80% of the other 20% will do nothing more than restore function or otherwise improve quality of life, rather than extend it. It's that tiny bit of remainder that will actually cause meaningful life extension, and these are the things that literally cost pennies.

E.G. what's important is not whiz-bang vaccines, but proper sanitation, NSAIDs, sterioids and the like. For a fraction of the cost, you get the majority of the benefit.

In short, diminishing returns on investment. No medicine this century is that much of an improvement on the "bessemer converter" level where it has obvious, large impacts on life expectancy. The ones that actually are tend to be treated as a heretic like Gallileo, as it inevitably is so effective because it upends the traditional understanding of bodily function. As such you should have very little hope for groundbreaking medical work to come out of corporate, given their witch hunting zeal.

In other words, you don’t have to shout slurs — if you criticize an employee’s performance, and the investigator thinks your criticism is unfair and that you are some flavor of bigot, that’s enough to justify a shakedown.

This means that virtually any interpersonal conflict in the workplace might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of litigation — and employees in protected categories have massive incentives to generate or fabricate such conflicts.

This risk is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, which is one reason that labor-intensive businesses are dominated by massive conglomerates. You have to pay to play.

Conservative commentators love to characterize HR and DEI as “dead weight” patronage jobs, as if they were the product of bureaucratic bloat or laziness — but DEI mandarins aren’t lying when they say they perform a business-critical function.

If you are identified as a thought-criminal with respect to any legally-protected category, and your employer fails to discipline or terminate you, then any gender creature at the office can decide that you make them Feel Unsafe, and start building a case to put their hand in the company’s pocket.

Corporations don’t hire sprawling HR and DEI departments out of inertia, or because they’re afraid of popular pressure: they do it because they need an internal constituency that is as crazy as their craziest employee — that can keep the organization up to date with the latest progressive moral panic, and punish dissenting employees long before they generate a lawsuit. A DEI department is as practically necessary to the modern American corporation as Legal or Accounting.

It’s a brilliant workaround — it would, of course, be unconstitutional for the regular police to monitor your private communications and punish you for ideological crimes — but the EEOC built a $30B network of internal informants and political officers (twice the size and 3X the budget of the KGB at its peak) who are not accountable to the Constitution, and got your boss to pay for it.

This is why only glad-handing empty suits can get promoted at 100+ person firms, by the way. Frank criticism and Fuhren unter Der Hand (without which a firm can't function) cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. As such the modern firm limps along as a cripple.

In short, they made it less useful so that people would spend more time "engaged" with the search. Dipshits. Bonus points for putting the retard who ran Yahoo search into the ground in charge of Google search.

The author seems close to understanding the actual problem with public firms in the US. I'm not sure if it's because "growf = bad" just plays better with the same SEO blind zombies chugging content, or if he genuinely doesn't understand that this short-termism is just defrauding shareholders rather than maximizing value. I suspect it's the latter, unfortunately, given the passion he displays for leftist claptrap in general.

This is a common failing on the left. Failing to call a crime by its proper name. This is due to the tack they take with regard to opposing odious malum-prohibitum; civilly disobey and hack at branches instead of striking the root.

Sovietist Texan betrayed by RU cossack brigade and tortured to death for kicks. A regrettable thing which which has been a theme with cossack brigades through history; like most premodern armies, they are more dangerous to the local population wherever they are sent than the enemy.

Like with other media contagions, it's at least less damaging than mass shootings.

Humorous to see North Korea become as South Korea is to Japan. This is still a positive development; I'm sure they'd rather toil away at a wacom than logging in siberian labor camps. Kind of sick to sanction people for offering less dreadful jobs than they could get otherwise.

People get their opinions where they get their corn pone at. This is why class analysis is the most reliable mental model for understanding politics. As such the left in the US has forgotten about it, as understanding politics means "we have met the enemy, and it is us". So rather than abandon their old ideology, they have chosen to become blind idiots focusing on irrelevant shit so they can pretend they give 2 shits about the class they used to be part of.

Predictably one of the planks for fixing it is "RETVRN". Which won't happen without the political situation totally undergoing phase change, as too many people get they corn pone thanks to the way things be.

This model explores the notion that the forces of nature diminish over cosmic time and that light loses energy over vast distances.

How people don't think this is happening out in the wide world of sports when attenuation through a medium is readily observable escapes me.

In which Murder, Inc. Kills people who who communicate in ways legible to the state. Social networks have always been about building these webs of relationships between people so they can play 6 degrees of osama bin laden on your ass.