Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

SF writer and software engineer.
#Languages, #science, #writing. he or they (shrug)
Glasgow Writers Group and Glasgow SF Writers' Circle.
It's sometimes difficult being me, but it's impossible to be anyone else.

website: https://torn-and-crumpled.page
all my books bundle: https://scav.gumroad.com/l/sHUm
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Last Notes

2026-07-06 08:46:10 UTC

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And there are equally old warnings, which is ironic, since there aren't any djinn or demons or fairies to make dangerous slippery-worded pacts with, so we built some ourselves. This is fine.
I assume the malicious deceptive beings in our ancestral environment that these cautionary tales were really warning about were ... us.

2026-05-10 11:32:04 UTC

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But for distilled water, I doubt tap water has so many dissolved salts that them not being there is significant. Your tissues are what, a 5% solution? That's a lot compared to the tiny amount in tap water.

2026-05-10 11:15:48 UTC

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I heard that if you drink too much of it, it messes with your biochemistry. I seem to remember it kills mice once a certain % of their water has been deuterated. Possibly once it's incorporated in your enzymes they stop working as well.

2026-04-11 21:52:17 UTC

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I don't see the point of arresting large numbers of people it'll be all but impossible to convict. A court said the government couldn't lawfully have made the protest illegal. How do you get a jury to agree that grannies are terrorists because even though the government broke the law by saying so, their unlawful rule is still *technically* in force? It's absurd, and the court should have voided the proscription to avoid this nonsense.

2026-03-29 11:09:37 UTC

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I don't see why the normal operations of political parties should be funded by people who don't support them, or indeed, people they intend to actively harm.
Cap the per-person donations and make them fund themselves from popular support.
Then have a public budget for mailings and party political broadcasts accessible to any parties registered and standing candidates in a specific election.

2026-03-23 10:55:56 UTC

Little Englanders foaming at the mouth about Islam in Britain, you sound like a 75 year old pished guy in a bowler hat and orange sash ranting in the pub about the looming threat of the papacy.
Ordinary Muslims you'd encounter in the UK are no more sinister and alien than ordinary Catholics. One day a week they maybe (or not) go to a fancy building to talk about God in a way that you don't connect with. Please try to be normal about that rather than let it eat your whole identity.

2026-03-22 09:25:44 UTC

Move purposefully and fix things.
Move gently and nurture life.
Move implacably and break chains.

2026-03-16 11:36:19 UTC

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Nobody knows how to end a war. Joining in has rarely done it, because it brings more factions into play and adds more grievances and more targets.
Starmer is a fool, and his willingness to be the tool of monsters is going to kill tens of thousands of people.

2026-03-15 11:40:14 UTC

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I think the far right have confused the American culture war manosphere bubble with how things are in Britain, perhaps out of wishful thinking.
Either that or they're confusing middle-aged men with the emotional development of a teenager as a representation of actual young men.

2026-03-14 17:11:03 UTC

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I think in general, even where generative AI kind of works, there's no productivity gain. It allows you to produce a great *volume* of documents, code, etc but not more *value* because that isn't in the text but in the ideas, understanding, morale etc of people in the business.
If you lay them off, you're admitting you didn't know what to do with that value or know that's where the value was.

2026-03-09 15:02:28 UTC

If I could put my finger on the different scale of the problem of starting a forever war in Afghanistan and starting a forever war with Iran, it's that half the world's shipping doesn't have to sail right past Afghanistan.
Guerrilla warfare used to mean losing the occasional truck or collaborator. Now oil tankers and container ships are on the menu.
Iran can't possibly *win* a war against the US, but they can make everybody lose, and why wouldn't they? Why *shouldn't* they use that deterrent?

2026-03-04 14:45:16 UTC

Paedophile billionaires starting wars to bring about the apocalypse are making mere revolution, trying them for their crimes, and nationalisation of their assets look like a measured, entirely thinkable, perhaps inevitable alternative.
Who knew the Overton Window could wrap round to the other side if you push it hard enough?

2026-02-27 09:33:35 UTC

If you're living in a time of monsters, no you aren't, you're living in a time of cowards. The monsters are and have always been outnumbered.

2026-02-25 11:32:57 UTC

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It could work again. They are schooling like fish, presenting thousands of moving targets in the hope that justice won't be able to pick many of them out, and relying on the idea that taking down a whole class of rich predatory men is socially unthinkable.
But we can think it. The fact that it's written down means lists can be made. The fact that it was international means one country's captured DOJ can't protect them all. Justice can get them one at a time. We can hope it does.

2026-02-22 11:07:55 UTC

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They could have cared even slightly about losing the progressive vote any time in the last 10 years, and they wouldn't have to fear it now that it's happening.
They even had a recent clear warning: at the last GE the Greens took some seats. The seal is broken; nobody can say Green is a wasted vote now.
That was the time to understand Labour's election win came not from moving right, but disgust with the Tories, and how fragile it'd be if their "Change" slogan was empty.

2026-02-19 21:35:04 UTC

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The same answer as I'd give for president of an independent Scotland (a more rational political entity, tbh):
1. You don't need one. It's customary for a state to have a "head", but there's no compelling reason to.
2. If you do have one, do NOT give them constitutional powers. A ceremonial figurehead can be elected by single plebiscite, yes. A head of the executive branch FUCK NO. Veto power over the people's parliament? Get in the sea. The people are sovereign.

2026-02-18 12:45:29 UTC

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SMH have these people never heard one of the great quotes of software engineering lore: "if it doesn't have to work I can make it as fast as you like"?
Isn't that from The Mythical Man Month or something?

2026-02-15 12:34:38 UTC

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And it's worse than that. An AI doesn't even simulate reality, it has no model of reality. It only processes tokens.
It's amazing how plausibly rearranging words about things can give the *impression* of a sentence with a meaning, but that's all.
Of course it's worse when the tokens are line segments of a diagram, middle-game chess moves etc. There's more meaning required per token, and the AI has none.

2026-02-13 16:46:43 UTC

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Yeah, I agree, they have put themselves in a terrible situation for the worst reasons, and if it can be made more terrible, so it affects their ability to cooperate with each other, it should be.
But the message to them shouldn't be "help us undermine your boss" it should be "when this is over you're going to be living in that detention centre until your trial date".

2026-02-13 16:25:24 UTC

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He's still a dick who believes he's entitled to play out his power fantasy, whether because the people he's doing it to are "illegals" or "bitches". If he believes anything with all his heart it's that. So I think that hypothetical guy is not going to stop doing it even if he also resents the assholes above him in the hierarchy. It's part of his pay package, and a very cash-efficient perk from his boss's point of view.

2026-02-13 16:10:32 UTC

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I don't mind if someone tries this and it throws a bit of sand in the gears of the concentration camp industrial complex the US seems to have going on.
But let's be clear. There is NO real difference between a "racist, misogynist asshole" and a "hardcore ideologue or fanatic". Racism and misogyny are extremist ideologies grounded in passionate false belief just as much as Maoism or Naziism. If they look less wild, more normal, then oops, well there's the problem.

2026-02-06 07:58:05 UTC

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Domain expert here: they aren't extremely effective for me in my field (programming) because to tell an LLM precisely enough what to do, I'd have to use a verbose English description, and I've already constructed the solution in my head in a more structural form that isn't words. Turning it back into words to tell an LLM what code to generate is a step backwards.

2026-01-26 17:20:25 UTC

The Tory party's talent pool dried up into stagnant slime when their candidate selection process devolved into finding incompetent but well-connected sociopaths who were good at sounding unhinged for the dwindling and bitter membership.
Now #ReformUK's candidate selection process seems to be poaching those incompetents who aren't even well-connected now after shitting the bed in various ways, but are more unhinged than ever.
So, the same arseholes who lost the last election to fuckin Starmer

2026-01-13 11:29:51 UTC

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That's not a secret, also not the point.
The 2 main things about free software that offend capital are:
1. Capital can't appropriate it easily and enclose the commons because of capital's own copyright laws
2. Individual human skill can't be owned by a company: it's a rare form of workers owning the means of production
LLMs attack this by:
1. selectively ignoring copyright with the blessing of the powerful
2. eroding the value of human skill to rebalance power in capital's favour

2026-01-13 11:13:27 UTC

I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone?
The push to adopt LLM-powered code generation tools is so frenzied and desperate partly because it's a perceived solution to claw back ownership of the means of production into the Right Hands.

2025-12-23 11:46:04 UTC

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Wording is precise; it's going to be impossible to credibly call it support for a proscribed organisation as such.
One could simply be supporting the prisoners' right to a timely fair trial, which isn't illegal. It can't in general be illegal to support them in their interactions with the courts, or it'd be illegal for them to have a lawyer too.
I mean, they could be arresting her because they don't know what else to do, but the Met can't intimidate her if the IDF couldn't.

2025-12-10 09:23:37 UTC

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1: Labour didn't promise any specific change. They used the slogan "Change"
2 & 3: As pro-status-quo centrists, they don't want to change systems by revoking anything already established, even if they criticised it before. They'll add ID cards but not revisit EU membership. They'll proscribe protest organisations, but not withdraw foreign policy support for a genocide.
4: I'd like to see any evidence at all that Labour are confronting the forces ranged against our democracy.

2025-12-04 18:39:14 UTC

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I struggle with the idea they should be treated as though striking has extra ethical problems for them so that can be used as leverage against them.
The doctors' disputes with the NHS in Scotland get resolved relatively quickly, so it's clear there's a political choice being made.

2025-12-04 10:52:22 UTC

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Quick poll:
Who do you think has the moral high ground?

2025-11-28 20:09:22 UTC

Just watched that really uncomfortable Star Trek TNG episode where everyone in the crew is playing the computer game that jerks you off.
Sorry if you'd forgotten that one and didn't want to be reminded that it exists.

2025-11-26 14:46:53 UTC

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But you do need to attack the leaders. You need to erode their image, ridicule them, dig dirt on them. That's 100% fair game, because they are what the negative populist has instead of a positive vision.
Farage is a racist, this is known from way back. He's also a gobshite and a grifter with nothing positive to offer UK politics. Having that absorbed into the electorate's consciousness is going to matter at the next election.
If it can be done to Jeremy Corbyn it can be done fairly to Farage.

2025-11-26 14:42:41 UTC

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This is one reason why it's a mis-step to make people too frightened about climate change by negative populism.
1) they will make bad decisions
2) which may include voting for a strong leader who'll put up machine-gun nests on the coast to stop all those brown people from fleeing the climate disasters and coming here.
The positive populist move is to show people what can be done about it, and what you're going to do, and how you're going to mitigate harm for ordinary people like them.

2025-11-26 14:39:22 UTC

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People make bad decisions when they're afraid, and the aim of right wing negative populism is to get them to make bad decisions *in your favour*.
But the gap there is, people with nothing to vote *for* are likely to stay at home, and you only want them to do that after you win.
The gap is filled with cruelty (which is cheap and of low value, but some people really love it) and strong leaders. People will vote for a strong leader and willingly ignore what he's going to do to them.

2025-11-26 14:36:05 UTC

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Consider two kinds of populism, which I'm going to call negative and positive. I don't at this point mean that negative populism is Bad and positive is Good, I just mean one focuses on engaging popular support by attacking things people don't want (or are told they don't want) and the other does it by presenting a vision of something they do want or can be told they do want.
Currently, the right is mostly doing negative populism. Ban this, stop that, deport them, lock 'em up.

2025-11-26 14:32:58 UTC

Had a few thoughts about whether we should stoop to the right's level and engage in personal attacks, or take the high road and stick to a policy message.
And the answer is yes.

2025-11-26 08:39:21 UTC

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Yes, this is unsatisfactory: the process is supposed to resolve the issue not just legally but politically.
If the government say, in effect, "we were right, the court agrees, but you lot aren't to be told why" that does nothing to end the debate, or the protests, which won't become MORE illegal.
Their position is morally untenable. Maybe the best outcome for them, too, is to lose, and just bullshit us that they were only taking a prudent course with the info known at the time.

2025-11-24 07:24:24 UTC

Yesterday I bothered to look it up, and apparently the conference pear is named for the National British Pear Conference of 1885 where it won first prize.
OK, but.
I haven't heard of this conference ever happening again (no Wikipedia article for the event itself), and there aren't any better pears as far as I know, so is it possible humanity achieved a fairly satisfactory pear 140 years ago and then lost interest?

2025-11-18 10:32:38 UTC

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Also anyway history is just our explanation of what happened, not the thing that happened itself. History rhyming can just be the wheel of fashion about how to describe things turning. Every day is brand new, too much information, and probably better described in a different way than the previous one.

2025-11-15 22:31:09 UTC

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You don't talk with nazis to understand nazis. Apart from anything else, nazis either don't understand much about what they are, or they do and they'll fucking *lie*. You study them, if you must, as you would study anything else dangerous.
You don't inject yourself with ebola to study virology. You don't breathe in lungfuls of fluorine to study chemistry.
But this dipshit has smartest guy in the room syndrome.

2025-11-10 10:22:35 UTC

Again the BBC demonstrate that by their criteria, criticising established power is bias, but sucking up to it is impartial, since sucking up to established power is normal and natural and a completely morally neutral thing to do.
Exercising journalistic power against the more powerful is right out: a resign or be fired offence. It's *taking sides*, you see.
Wielding a journalistic platform carelessly against those without power is, again, normal and natural therefore impartial.

2025-10-25 11:06:52 UTC

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In that respect, I'm a gradualist. But my long term aims and ideals are very far to the left and more socially humane than the midpoint of the UK's political mainstream. I'd vote for a moderate policy, not because moderate is better than ideal, but to move towards the ideal from where we are now by an achievable step.

2025-10-25 11:03:31 UTC

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If you have humane ethical principles and defend your policy proposals by evidence and data, then going slowly enough to not to startle the population and make them dig their heels in, allowing for the imperfect rationality of those you aim to serve, isn't centrism, it's gradualism. You're not aiming for a "centre" between different ideological goals as if the balance itself had value, you're aiming for what you determine to be the best policy for now.

2025-10-25 09:53:36 UTC

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The problem for centrists is in *saying* reasonable, pragmatic, balanced policies are what is needed, but then completely failing to do that in the only way that can work: evidence-based policy with humane goals.
Because the evidence points a little further left and progressive than they feel the Holy and Perfect Centre to be, so the evidence *must* be wrong.
But trying to hit the centre between humane and inhumane or evidence-based and bullshit is a fool's politics.

2025-10-19 16:37:32 UTC

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Every place name in Britain is at least 3 layers deep of invaders misunderstanding the language of the people who were living there before them. Now they are written down in "English", a language with spelling that is possibly a series of practical jokes which got accidentally fossilised by the invention of the printing press.

2025-10-16 07:29:40 UTC

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Kind of, but since javascript became standard on browsers, that's always been available for free. And it hasn't been hard to get free compilers for C or interpreters for Perl, Python or Lisp. There's just been an overwhelming barrier for most people to figuring out where to start and what you might want to do with them.
Some of it might be that what you can make in the first year or so of learning doesn't feel very impressive next to the apps and games you can buy.

2025-09-27 16:08:34 UTC

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Yeah a general strike has the advantage that most of the people taking part aren't out in the streets to be shot at, and even if they were, shooting them doesn't make them go in to work the next day.

2025-09-27 09:44:16 UTC

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Sorry if I ranted a bit much. You're right it's not a binary. I see some hope in grassroots replacement of not-fascist-yet candidates with anti-fascist ones.
I think there's a difference between institutional safeguards and legal safeguards. A fascist can ignore the rules, rules are paper, but it should be hard for them to get institutions to ignore the rules. Institutions are made of people and culture. It's not nothing.

2025-09-27 09:34:09 UTC

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"Not fascism yet for the next 4 years" is better than "fascism for an indefinite time", sure. But it's NOT GOOD ENOUGH. It's not acceptable. It's a fool's bargain, harm deferral rather than harm reduction.
The correct alternative to a constant risk of fascism is the dismantling of the tools of fascism, institutional safeguards against it, and restructuring to solve the economic problems fascists use to recruit support for their simple, cruel non-solutions.

2025-09-22 07:28:36 UTC

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Of course. It's not even about "statistical and computational limits" like this was a deep question that only careful research could resolve.
The simple fact is *a recombination of words from a set of true statements is not necessarily a true statement*
People have been pointing this out right from the start, and being ignored because the party trick of human-like language was so compelling.

2025-09-20 15:28:13 UTC

What i find frustrating about people sucked into the right wing populist hate vortex is there's something so obviously missing. Why can't they see it? Is it missing in them too?
The whole vibe is negative. No positivity, no vision for improvement. Despite slogans about making things great again, there's no proposal to even make them better.
No plan to train and hire enough doctors, nurses and teachers, build enough houses, run enough trains.
It's all stopping, cutting, banning, deporting.

2025-09-04 08:52:05 UTC

I've found a use for AI. If you start typing a sentence and it successfully autocompletes what you were about to say, it was obviously something trite and overdone, so delete it and think of something better.

2025-08-27 12:08:37 UTC

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Campbell tried to claim a particular way of looking at some stories as if it was a hallowed tradition, but he was a narrow-minded jerk at best.
My culture includes *reading* all of those early kinds of SF, but the fact that they *exist* isn't a tradition. A tradition would be a thing a significant number of people were still doing just because "that's how we write SF," and if there is such a group, I'm not part of it.

2025-08-27 10:38:47 UTC

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Since a lot of things people call traditions are only from the last century, you could say that. But then I'd have to say only people writing like Mary Shelley or Jules Verne would be writing traditional SF, which is hardly anyone, so it's a localised tradition not part of my culture in the same way that town in Nova Scotia has a pumpkin boat race every year.

2025-08-27 07:55:25 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 27 Aug
How traditional is your writing? Which tradition?
I don't know. My writing is quite *conventional*, if only in terms of grammar and punctuation, even with the style shifted for genre and setting (e.g. even if I'm trying to parody Jane Austen I don't do indirect speech in quotes, which seems weird nowadays, I'll just suggest the style with word choices).
I don't think it's a question of tradition as such. The whole idea of writing SF is too recent to have tradition.

2025-08-26 08:39:11 UTC

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One thing inheritance tax can do that is worth doing is limiting the generational sequestration of wealth, land and property that doesn't encourage enterprise or creativity but produces generations of idle-witted rent-seekers.
I don't personally believe the profit motive drives the best of human endeavour but those who claim to should at least be consistent and admit the race is more interesting if you don't get to start past the finish line.

2025-08-26 08:30:27 UTC

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The idea that the wealth someone has accumulated above the inheritance tax threshold has "already been taxed" is dubious at best anyway.
It assumes someone with far more than the usual amount of wealth hasn't taken advantage of all the available loopholes and tax-free incentives (that aren't in practice available or useful to the less wealthy) Which I for one doubt.
The only double-dipping taxation I see is means testing benefits and services income tax should pay for.

2025-08-19 07:58:24 UTC

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at least "Blue Labour" was somewhat socially progressive. Streeting's just a Tory boy.

2025-08-16 09:46:22 UTC

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I think people give the Mercator projection too much credit for racism and the imperial fish-eye-lens view of geopolitics that Europe has been perfectly capable of without it. It did help ships full of racist thieves navigate with straight lines on the map as constant compass headings, but making Africa look small and the lands of the Cree and Inuit look vast was never the point; the racist thieves were going to rob them all either way.

2025-08-01 18:15:38 UTC

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Medvedev has a history of getting drunk on the job and making grandiose nuclear threats, and it's never been a serious problem before because nobody takes him seriously, but now a cognitively-damaged narcissist with poor impulse control who thinks everything has to be about him is in charge in the US.

2025-07-30 18:15:30 UTC

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Amazon have always been kind of shit at search, but it makes sense when you realise its recommendations have never been about what *you* might want.

2025-07-25 06:23:27 UTC

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He likes accepting invitations from creepy rich guys to visit islands.
Also characteristically for his island visits, he's in Scotland without our consent.

2025-07-13 10:11:41 UTC

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When people say the workers who create wealth with their labour need to put up with miserable conditions so the wealth can grow, they're telling on themselves about what they think the purpose of wealth is, and whose stake in it matters.
And that's even if it was efficient to let talentless, entitled bullies "manage" the production of wealth, which as you point out, it isn't.

2025-07-01 14:42:37 UTC

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LOL, and indeed LMAO
Keir Starmer is such a bootlicking scold with no moral character or authority, and it shows in the side he takes on every issue.

2025-06-29 14:51:41 UTC

I don't go around wishing death to people.
So I wish [X] to the IDF, where [X] is whatever condition will promptly and permanently stop them sniping at children, starving a captive civilian population, and shooting desperately hungry people queuing for food.
If you don't like "Death", You can suggest any better [X] you do like, or you can try and explain why you disagree with the goal of stopping them doing those things, if you're a miserably defective human being.

2025-06-25 11:46:30 UTC

You can make it illegal to support Palestine Action, but you can't compel anyone to support Palestine inaction.

2025-06-24 07:21:23 UTC

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English has a partly logosyllabic script like Japanese except the characters are clumps of Latin letters that have acquired a particular pronunciation for historical reasons and the same set of letters are also used for affixes and phonetic transcription of loan words.

2025-06-13 09:39:21 UTC

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Labour are avowed centrists now, and centrism is a form of extremism that denies morality in politics. There is no right thing or wrong thing to do, there are only middle things to do.
They've let the far right decide where the middle thing is on trans rights by letting exterminationism be one of the sides to find a middle ground with, instead of rejecting the idea of debating human rights *outright*, which a progressive party would do.

2025-06-03 12:02:01 UTC

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She was a quirky, kind of heroic but not really respected character for the news media when she was a child warning about climate change, up to the point when she started accurately identifying the systemic cause of the problem (extractive capitalism) at which point she was suddenly invisible.

2025-05-27 10:48:01 UTC

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Exactly. It's not about how many, it's about who was killed and with what intent and rhetoric.
If there was any safe number of an ethnic minority countries were allowed to murder before it was officially a genocide triggering sanctions under international law, you can be sure some countries would be killing that many minus 1 every year.
The problem is Israel has realised there may be no number of Palestinians they can kill that will cause any meaningful pushback by the West.

2025-05-21 07:39:10 UTC

A dragon sitting on a pile of treasure is a profoundly amoral being.
You don't slay it to get the gold "back", you slay it because otherwise there is no end to what it will demand as tribute. It'll burn a city to increase its pile even by a small amount, and it will *never* not demand the pile get larger.

2025-05-20 16:49:31 UTC

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Social cohesion is made of tolerance and solidarity. You can't scapegoat and demonise your way out of a crisis that scapegoating and demonising got you into.

2025-05-17 08:57:09 UTC

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Or they aren't his opponents, but rather his backers in the role of Tory continuity Labour PM, and switching back to any far right government at the next election is preferable to doing any social democracy that might risk moving the Overton window back.

2025-05-15 09:12:17 UTC

All spaces should be safe for all women.
Any attempt to designate specific safe spaces for women as a benevolent gift of the patriarchy (outside of which boys will be boys) harms women.
Any attempt to carve out exceptions to who counts as sufficiently a woman to deserve safety as a woman (especially legislated for by the governments and courts of the patriarchy) harms women.
If a 56-year old white man can understand this, anyone who claims not to is a liar or a dimwit.

2025-05-12 15:22:34 UTC

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anyway...
Vote Green.

2025-05-12 15:21:55 UTC

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It's "incalculable" damage because he won't calculate it. if he did, he knows it wouldn't be damage at all.
He should be pressured to say why he can't calculate it, and if it's so incalculable how he knows it's significant or even a problem at all.
But he won't be.

2025-05-07 06:39:29 UTC

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Same :)

2025-05-06 07:22:54 UTC

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I think there's a distinction between fiercely occupying a weird little corner of your own field of study, and going outside it with unearned confidence in a bunch of unsupported ideas.
I suspect there are a lot of topics on which I would NOT want to hear his opinion, and if he goes full Hossenfelder, he's cancelled :)

2025-05-04 10:59:12 UTC

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Oh I reckon he's a smart guy. He's a real working mathematician, not a self-educated crank. He's just set himself an unusually restrictive set of rules to work within. He's found some interesting stuff in that narrow space, or at least interesting ways to express it educationally. I don't think it has to be more than that.
Obviously nobody else has to agree to accept his rules for what's legitimate maths.

2025-05-04 09:18:50 UTC

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I think he has a fair point in rejecting the continuum of Real numbers (as in all infinite sequences of digits after the point including uncomputable ones); that is kind of incoherent.
If he thinks God says numbers have to be able to be written as a sequence of digits or a fraction, that'd explain why he cares so much, but I don't see why he'd think God disallows numbers like e and pi defined exactly as a limit you can do algebra on like any other number.

2025-02-21 17:23:23 UTC

We are not trying to get back to the way things were. The way things were is how we got here.

2024-12-26 18:48:50 UTC

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All it takes is one of these two parties to say "fuck this, leaving the EU obviously didn't work, those UKIP/Brexit/Reform guys were full of shit in 2016 and still are now, we're going to rejoin the single market"

2024-12-26 18:33:36 UTC

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My question about this is, what are the Lib Dems doing? Stand up! What are the E&W Greens doing? Make some noise. The second widest fucking open goal in UK politics is sitting there. Come on.
(The widest was the last election, and Labour walked it in after the other team sent off their own goalie at half time)

2024-12-22 09:51:11 UTC

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Turns out a lot of the "antisemitism" in the Labour left was anti-fascism.
When a supposedly Labour party purges its left wing of anti-fascists leaving a core of slippery, unprincipled centrists in charge, they are in no way *equipped* to face down the billionaire-bankrolled fascism rising for the next election. Even if they understood why it's a problem and were inclined to take it seriously.

2024-12-17 12:20:40 UTC

If you live in the UK then even if you don't expect this petition to go anywhere, or even if you aren't 100% sure what the whole trans rights thing is actually about, you should sign this petition.
If for no other reason than that government policy should be based on evidence, not bullshit hand-waving and politically-motivated conclusions that don't even follow from the minimal evidence considered.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/700217

2024-12-16 12:09:53 UTC

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I think that's fine if they agree it's conditional on the IDF not murdering any children pending the appeal too.

2024-12-11 20:12:14 UTC

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I'll never understand people who, given a choice, choose the less funny of the options available.

2024-12-04 16:29:02 UTC

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It's a source of constant frustration for my wife that I don't know how to solve *any computer problems at all* based on how she describes them, but can generally do it by clicking around randomly until I find the option that might fix it, which I have no idea what it might be called until I see it, and will *instantly* forget afterwards.

2024-11-28 11:23:52 UTC

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Turns out, search that has been zealously tuned to optimise finding stuff to buy and places to buy it from is not very good at finding advocacy for not buying things.

2024-11-27 17:46:23 UTC

If a tech company estimates their data centre will need X million litres of water a year for cooling and then come back later saying they need 10X million litres, the publicly-owned water authority should say, sorry, no, additional litres above what we agreed will cost £100 each, fuck you.

2024-11-27 17:41:59 UTC

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The social consequences of getting caught using AI have to be absolutely PUNITIVE relative to collaborative editing by humans, to create a pro-human incentive.
Ideally that's achieved by making asking for human help a kinder and more productive experience, but if it has to happen by flat rejection, instant F, public shaming of AI slop, so be it.

2024-11-24 20:51:14 UTC

There's no reason why you should bother to help create economic growth for the benefit of people who see you as a disposable component in a machine having economic growth for their benefit as its only purpose.

2024-11-20 10:36:03 UTC

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Only out of idle curiosity. The idea of burying bad news comes from an assumption that power could be held to account by the exposure of bad news about it. But we're past that. Power has decided not to be accountable, and simply lie or brazen it out no matter what.
We're now in the era of needing community solidarity, personal ethics, and direct action. News has been so completely co-opted and poisoned that it's no longer a useful part of that.

2024-11-19 23:08:19 UTC

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Unfortunately, Scottish Labour doesn't ever go against UK Labour on a vote. They sort of dangle the implication of more humane or left wing policies in front of the media for a bit, but always shut up rather than put up when it comes to practical action.
It'd be nice for that pattern to break, but if they wouldn't do it to remove the Tory 2 child cap and "rape clause" I'm not confident there will be "Change" coming from that direction.

2024-11-10 12:53:32 UTC

I got an email from my phone/broadband provider saying all the copper landlines are being replaced by digital phone services operating over broadband.
This means in the event of a power cut, the landline phones are not going to work, so cannot be used to contact emergency services or police in the event of accidents or crises caused or aggravated by loss of power and lighting.
This seems like something to be aware of in a country with underfunded infrastructure.

2024-11-03 10:29:15 UTC

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We can hope that as a hollow, unprincipled tailor's-dummy-in-a-donated-suit, Starmer was only meeting with Trump because he doesn't comprehend political integrity, and not because he supports the goals of the far right. It was a stupid unforced error not to wait instead, and see if the orange rapist would end up in prison or the White house, but I'm sure he'll suck up to Harris just as readily when she wins.

2024-11-01 10:57:15 UTC

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How much is due to emergency reduction of dependency on Russian hydrocarbons?
Good, as long as when the invasion of Ukraine has been defeated and sanctions on Russia lift, Europe doesn't go back to the same fuel consumption.
You could say, it's OK, the switch to renewables won't be reversed. But the cult of infinite growth demands every resource be exploited to the maximum, so there's a danger it'll be renewables PLUS gas and oil in a few years and we'll still be screwed.

2024-10-25 14:59:36 UTC

I think we should give Ukraine whatever they need to evict Russia and get the war over with, and if that starts a nuclear war then it will be very sad but objectively better for the planet than whatever the fuck this is.

2024-10-24 06:14:35 UTC

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Apart from anything else, I bet the people who lived there have heard of it.
Besides, intentionally destroying a cultural site is a war crime, and that isn't subject to a notability test or online poll of which randos have heard of it.
Tone is hard to judge in posts, so sorry if I come off as a little abrupt. You also probably didn't intend to sound like a discourse-poisoned ignoramus.

2024-10-23 12:30:30 UTC

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I don't see how it can actually be close. He definitively lost last time, both poular vote and electoral college, and has done nothing to attract more voters since then. More rabid voters maybe, but not MORE voters, which is what counts.
Who could possibly have voted Dem 4 years ago, but is now thinking "you know what, this time Trump is senile and racist enough to get my vote"
Just wait, and watch who is pushing the *appearance* of a close race and remember.

2024-10-20 07:07:19 UTC

Something for #mosstodon today. A stone torii gate and fox statue, Mount Inari, near Kyoto
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/338/468/887/491/263/original/2fa08f177ba75e16.jpg
https://media.mastodon.scot/media_attachments/files/113/338/475/577/131/744/original/4146822a7f6abf21.jpg