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• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Greg, I must have read some Rider-Haggard as a kid but I guess it didn't make much of an impression on me. I'll just note that noble-savage and native sidekick tropes which were probably well intentioned and relatively progressive in...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Graham's comment @ 7 about a Biggles relatively tolerant of colonised people was interesting, though there's a long history of more sophisticated imperialists working to understand the peoples of the periphery in order to better exploit and conquer them, without...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  (CW: brief reference to rape) If the word which follows "Elon" is "bullshitting", then I think it's pretty clear I'm not an unalloyed fanboi. I largely agree with your objection to the aw-shucks-just-regular-folks performance of the ultra-elite, and the problematic...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Nick Barnes @328: Just saw your comment after posting. I am not remotely an Elon/ Musk fanboi. I tend to use first names because (a) it's one of many tics Australians use to pretend we don't have a class system,...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Oh! Thanks. I had no idea Tesla had dry cell (Maxwell, 4680) tech up and running in (limited) mass production. I think I'd assumed it was just Elon bullshitting about some limited, iterative improvement. But no, it's a moderately big...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Worth noting that Tesla's battery factories are joint ventures with Panasonic. The tech in each individual little battery cell is essentially all panasonic's IP. Tesla was genuinely innovative in figuring out how to glom a bunch of those cells together...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Expanding on my observation @173: All those right wing/ Randian/ neo-liberal arguments in favour of tax cuts for billionaires and against redistributive policies ultimately rest on a denial of the diminishing marginal utility of money. They even implicitly argue that,...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Various strains of entirely mainstream economics argue that the marginal utility of money doesn't in fact diminish as people get richer. That an extra dollar has exactly the same worth to a billionaire and an unemployed person, because they can...
• Commented on Bad news day
  This is an interesting piece on the religious aspects of Russian motivation/ propaganda. (By ex-NSA never Trumper John Schindler). https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/putins-attack-on-ukraine-is-a-religious As always with arsehole dictators, and as with the mystical nationalist weirdness descibed in the Grauniad piece Greg linked to,...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  I assume this will be of interest to many on here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  I'm going to have to go back and reread now....
• Commented on Roll the dice
  Oh, and cosplay-while-black can be fatal: https://boingboing.net/2014/11/26/new-video-emerges-of-black-cos.html...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  In a world where elves and wizards are suddenly real, LARPing and cosplay is likely going to be both culturally insensitive and dangerous (for the same reasons that blackface is noxious and cosplay with fake guns and swords is dangerous...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Shurely birth registrations with no father listed would suffice to track Boris, albeit with a nine month lag....
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Condolences for the loss of another novel to our malfunctioning simulation, Charlie. Harry Bingham's Fiona Griffiths series of crime novels feature a detective constable protagonist recovering from Cotard's syndrome. They're a lot of fun, especially the sense of place in...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Crosstown Traffic Australia's six state government public transport ministers have their chauffeur driven ministerial cars removed, and are forced to get around exclusively on the buses, trains and trams they neglect administer. Snigger as their factional rivals plot against them...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  After Trump won the 2016 primaries, I remember thinking that the 2020 Republican primaries would be a not very guilty pleasure, as every swivel eyed, bigoted lunatic in the GOP competed to replicate Trump's strategy and complete the destruction of...
• Commented on Too Many Thoughts About Genre
  Nitpick: Bloomsbury didn't release an adult cover edition of Harry Potter until September '98, well after it had gone viral, and the second book had been released. The story goes that a Bloomsbury staffer spotted a commuter on the tube...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  Greg @493, Charlie@489, Advertising is older than that. It was around in the ancient world. Here's a gratuitous dick pic pointing the way to a Pompeii brothel: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/history-advertising-no-142-pompeii-penis/1357977 What was missing was mass media and joint stock companies to advertise...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  I'm not a gamer, but I assume Zelda players tend to splurge as they approach their wallet limit? Extravagant consumption isn't what we want to encourage. . . Something like Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax would have much the same extreme...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  The real question then is how to render the billionaires sufficiently afeared or constrained that altruism becomes their best option. Or, y'know, taxed until they're no longer billionaires....
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Re. Billionaire long game influence buying: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/it-took-decades-but-the-anti-new-deal-crusaders-have-triumphed...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Charlies experiment could be gamed out in a purely sociopathic way, altruistic only out of enlightened self interest, otherwise maximising for wealth, power and control freakery. That likely describes most billionaires. Flipping this about a bit, if most of them...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  $100 billion won't buy you a country, but a fraction of it will buy you many governments. The really startling thing about campaign, think tank, and other propaganda spending in democracies is not how much there is, but how little....
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE, Part 2
  I mean, performative insurgents on the fringes of institutions, exploiting the flaws and loopholes of the system- the tax break, the Apprentice edit suite, the media's appetite for the controversial soundbite, without the discipline or pro-social requirements of working within...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE, Part 2
  Thank you for the Wodehouse bollocks link. Boris's chaotic dishevelment seems to be a genuine part of his personality, or pathology, and carefully calculated pose, or branding exercise. He's one of those charmed monsters who've figured out how to use...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE, Part 2
  “Overweening ambition dedicated to one goal – self-advancement", in Dixon's phrase certainly fits Boris, but I'm not sure much else does. He's no stiff necked, inflexible, spit and polish martinet. Enthusiastically unprincipled flexibility has got him where he is today....
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Flogging a dead horse here, but the F-105 Thunderchief (which had 2-seater variants) and F-111 were both capable of going supersonic for about 45 minutes courtesy of large fuel capacity. You'd still need a single in-air refuel, which would presumably...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  Thank you. The Iron Dream sounds like it's up several of my alleys. Also, Hitlerian "pump" fiction is the best and worst of typos....
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  I know about Mencius Moldbug and Paul Krugman. Without being indiscreet,do you have any other fans who might surprise/ delight/ appal us? On second thoughts, indiscretion is probably a plus....