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• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  I think you are correct that the plutocrats are trying to build escape mechanisms for themselves from climate change. But it turns out that plutocrats are not particularly bright: if anyone doubted that there is a very public ongoing demonstration...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  [...] but you'll understand how it works! No, no you won't. What will happen is quite different. At some point in the past a system of grimoires was arrived at which was both far safer than preceding (and many succeeding)...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  I recently noticed something interesting in the cinema. I've seen three movies in the last couple of weeks, two of which were definitely mainstream. The ads before them all were, relatively speaking, 'woke'. But ads have one purpose: to sell...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  I think you may be missing what I was trying to say. A cure for cancer is like a cure for dying: it's not going to happen (I think). But a cure for whatever killed Jobs, while still very unlikely...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  Problem: cancer is a diagnosis Yes, I really did mean whatever specific thing he had: whatever the specific underlying thing was, not the symptom. It would be astonishing if there turns out to be 'a cure for cancer', but...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  I think there is a potential utility for very large amounts of personal wealth, which is that you can choose to do things with it which are very high risk / very high benefit which governments generally can't do because...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  Photo ID for voting is indeed an attempt to solve a very real problem: that problem is that the johnsonites might lose power....
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  The important question is not whether that can happen – obviously it can – but whether there is evidence that is does happen. If it doesn't, actually, happen, or almost never happens, then the fear that it could in theory...
• Commented on An update on the revolutionary experiment
  It's long seemed to me that Johnson is in fact a fairly rudimentary paperclip maximizer, where the paperclips he's maximizing are Johnson. Johnson doesn't care about brexit, about the climate[*], or actually about anything other than achieving maximum johnson. This...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Third possibility - the activity is something that doesn't generally appeal to members of the group or conflicts with some element of group identity. Right, of course. Programming just doesn't generally appeal to women, does it? (Except, you know, lesbians,...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  So 'in many cases, there IS no current and actual discrimination against them'. Which cases exactly are these? It is of course, very nice to imagine that we've all somehow managed the bigotry which has afflicted humans since there were...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  I don't think you read what I wrote carefully enough. I said 'there is discrimination against that group with regard to that activity': I didn't say, at all, where that discrimination came from. In the case of the police, say,...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  Greg: I agree, probably very few police officers are openly racist. But still there is an enormous disparity between the police force and population they serve: you are less than half as likely to be black if you are a...
• Commented on Official Announcement: April Fools Day is Cancelled
  The whole report on racism thing. If there is some group in the population which is under-represented in some activity (where enough people do that activity to be statistically meaningful) then there really are only two options that I can...
• Commented on What happens now?
  What he actually is, along with being weak and vain and a compulsive liar, is the World's most successful con man. I disagree, mostly. Famously he has made less money than he would have if he had simply stuck the...
• Commented on What happens now?
  There was a large surge of people coming to DC because Trump had arranged a rally there and they were coming to the rally. Every football game or big rock concert involves a large surge of people all going to...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Trump blew his chances by pulling the trigger two weeks prematurely (assuming it was intentional, and not just a chaotic fuck-up). I think there's an important point here. I think it was intentional in the sense that clearly he wanted...
• Commented on What happens now?
  The obvious result is a split of some kind in what is now the Republican party, with the nazi faction in one part and the people who believe in democracy in the other. The problem with that is that the...
• Commented on So you say you want a revolution
  The Bullingdon club is nothing to do with being an aristocrat. It's to do with being male, at Oxford, and having gone to one of a small set of 'right' schools. In other words, it's to do with your parents...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  Four more years of Trump means that humans will certainly fail to do enough to deal with climate change. In the short term that doesn't mean that much. If we survive long enough for there to be a long term,...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  You are obviously correct that brexit was something confected, and that a lot (although not all: something that the last few years seems to have shown is that there are a lot of people who have really, really vile views...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I think that can't happen because it misses a fairly large elephant: London. I no longer recall where the brexit vote was strongest, but I do recall that the short answer was 'not London', which was pretty heavily remain. I...
• Commented on No comment necessary
  Same people who deal with it now: immigrants, largely. So even if we ignore the 'senile bigots really do not like immigrants' problem, immigrants from where? When exponential population growth ends, it ends: there are no more convenient unbounded...
• Commented on No comment necessary
  It's not a bad thing (it's probably a good thing) if there are less people. But if the birth rate falls then, other things being equal, you go through a period where there are proportionally a lot more old people,...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  The other possibility is to go left and be honest. Now you're not forcing the right further right, there's a chance that the more moderates in that party might get a voice. You can move the window a bit left....
• Commented on Cough Cough
  And I've finally realised what the whole 'I drove to test my eyesight' thing was probably about. Yes, it's a lie, and yes, it's an obvious lie that anyone could see is a lie. But really, it's an insult: what...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  I find that anything that can get me moving or laughing gets me over the inertia. I think the paths out probably vary. In my case what would happen is that I'd eventually get up and practice the guitar (or...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  I am not a diagnostician but I'd say he's at least an Asperger's if not full-blown autistic (and may Ghu forgive me for throwing terms like that around about someone I don't actually know personally). I think he's a psychopath,...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  So Cummings has said that he drove to Bernard Castle (having previously lied and said he didn't I think) to test his eyesight. Because that's what you do if you're worried about your eyesight: you get in a car, with...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  However, on a purely tactical basis what are they thinking? That's your mistake, right there. They weren't thinking: they can't thinking. The current government is dominated by people who think brexit-at-any-cost is a good idea, and who apparently look up...