Fazal Majid

Fazal Majid

  • Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
    Charlie, have you read the excellent "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner? It has a chapter on Korzybski's General Semantics that completely explains the Van Vogt Null-Aleph books (and IIRC Jerry Pournelle also took that...
  • Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
    I refuse to create a ChatGPT account because their user database will be hacked, sooner or later Yep: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/over-100000-chatgpt-account-credentials-made-available-on-the-dark-web...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    The Guardian has an excellent series on how that works: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/series/queens-consent Notable is the fact the Crown is exempted from anti-discrimination laws. Convenient, since until at least the 1970s black and brown people were deemed unfit to do anything more...
  • Commented on Place your bets
    There is a corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficientlyadvanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo"....
  • Commented on Make Up a Guy
    They don't even have to be human. If AGI ever becomes reality, wouldn't involuntarily shutting down an AI be tantamount to murder?...
  • Commented on Decision Fatigue
    California's CCPA was augmented by CPRA in 2020, and is now not meaningfully weaker than GDPR (not to mention that actual GDPR enforcement is a farce, as it is devolved to the regulated company's EU/EEA HQ's host country's DPA. Most...
  • Commented on London Bridge
    Omron makes a very expensive blood pressure monitor watch: https://omronhealthcare.com/products/heartguide-wearable-blood-pressure-monitor-bp8000m/ As for the iPhone 14, its lack of USB-C makes it anything but shiny in my book. The biggest feature, the satellite emergency system (which will apparently consume 85% of...
  • Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
    I mean, right now Tesla is valued higher than VW, Toyota, and Ford combined: really? Yes, really. Electric cars are mechanically simpler than ICE ones, and cost 1/3 the labor to assemble, so Tesla has a much leaner workforce...
  • Commented on Oh, 2022!
    Everybody loves unregulated derivatives markets until their imaginary wallet full of monkey jpegs gets stolen. (None of this would have made any sense to anyone in 2011) Still doesn't to me, except as vindication for Keynes' adage that markets...
  • Commented on Outage report
    I’d suggest moving to a static site generator like Hugo and hosting it directly on Cloudflare Pages, running only the comments on your own server. That said, even a well-trod migration like WP to Hugo is fraught (your posts don’t...
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    Most of the British press was rabidly anti-EU long before the Leveson Enquiry. That's the toxic miasma in which a young Boris Johnson learned the trade of post-truthiness journalism, after all (as well as other obscenities like complaining gun control...
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    Feudalism starts at the top, with the Queen and her Royal Consent that basically allows her to exempt herself from democratically voted laws, in total secrecy (and the Scottish devolved government is just as enthusiastic about secrecy on this as...
  • Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
    Considering the UK has no written constitution, no separation of powers, no judicial review and entrenched feudalism, the actually surprising thing is that it actually took so long to go sideways....
  • Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
    I'm pretty sure he grew up reading the same right-wing near-future American SF yarns as me Yes, certainly reminds me of the Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle yarn "Fallen Angels", minus the SF fandom service....
  • Commented on A death in the Firm
    Well, he fought against the Nazis, unlike his uncle-in-law, and his mother is honored at Yad Vashem, so by the dismal standards of monarchies, he was woke, no matter how archaic some of his attitudes. Even staunch republicans like Scottish...
  • Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
    I thought that was precisely why you introduced the notion of combat epistemologist in the Laundry Files. That said, as a freshly minted resident of London, the supine acquiescence of the English to corruption and a mendacity on a grand...
  • Commented on What happens now?
    Centrist coups generally don't happen because you need worked-up radicals with fire in their belly to run a successful coup. The Thermidor coup ending Robespierre’s Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Do not underestimate the psychological effect on...
  • Commented on So you say you want a revolution
    For those who think that in an élan of racial solidarity the Australians and Canadians will welcome white English refugees: there are decades of evidence there is no such solidarity within England itself (perhaps a millennium if you go back...
  • Commented on Dead plots
    In addition to burned 5G masts, No Signal is a reality for me on Hampstead High Street, probably one of the poshest places in the UK, because of wealthy Hampstead residents' NIMBYism for cellular towers. Now that governments in the...
  • Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
    Some sort of ranked voting system would improve ALL our lives but the people who might authorize it are the ones whose re-election depends on NOT giving voters a choice. The British electorate had that option in the 2011 Alternative...
  • Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
    @Charlie Your model is flawed. The entrenched oil companies or military-industrial complex are more likely to murder a do-gooder than a popular revolution a billionaire. Their interests are more concentrated, which solves the coordination problem, and they already have extensive...
  • Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
    Well, the UK "constitution" has no prohibition against bills of attainder, unlike the US, so the only thing preventing them is the ECHR so detested by Conservatives, and Ms. Priti Patel is said to be fond of capital punishment. Thus...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    Another example is how California inspired the open kitchen trend: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/where-mother-saw-best/305896/ Now that the lady of the house is more likely to be working at a computer on the three freelance jobs she does to keep the family's finances afloat,...
  • Commented on Social architecture and the house of tomorrow
    I must be an outlier as I am moving from a 83 year old house in a newish city (San Francisco) to a less than 10 year old apartment in an ancient one (London) with unimaginably luxurious amenities like a...
  • Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (2)
    Surely you mean Brexit...
  • Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
    2. About 100 Tories and a smaller number of Labour MPs are so adamantly pro-Brexit that if she goes back on A50 she'll split the party, possibly causing the emergence of a new right-wing party and effectively depriving the...
  • Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
    Fazal rhymes with "puzzle". Majid with a j as in "jay", not "hay" (Arabic in origin, not Spanish, although Spanish certainly has a lot of Arabic influences)....
  • Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
    The UK public, Parliament and government are hopelessly divided and incapable of making a decision. Normally this would lead to maintaining the status quo but that's not how Article 50 works. I would guess it will be withdrawn eventually (after...
  • Commented on Peak Brexit
    "the Laundry Files are satire, dammit, not a political documentary!" So you get to experience how Margaret Atwood feels......
  • Commented on Do my Homework
    @Daniel Duffy There is plenty of non-feudalist fantasy, Fritz Lieberman, Glen Cook and Steven Erikson, although the fact this sub genre is called “Low fantasy” is very telling....
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