@m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane "Eurabia" conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you'd taken his word salad and substituted "jews" for "muslims" Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That's when I added ESR to my list of "people I will not share a platform with".)
He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.
@froztbyte Your term of art in economics to describe this shitbaggery is "Veblen goods": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
"a type of luxury good… for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure."
@BlueMonday1984 Betcha the authors aren't getting paid industry-normal royalties (10-15% of net receipts) on those Veblen goods …
(A few of my novels have been sold as limited-run signed first editions. Typically for 50%-100% more than the normal hardcover price, so maybe 3-5% as much as this nonsense. Cost of goods for a leatherbound, gilt-trimmed luxury edition is maybe $5-10, plus 10% of the cover price for the author. So someone in the middle is making serious bank.)
@V0ldek You missed maintenance and logistics. Military gear is typically amortized over a 30 year period, so a £3M missile might actually cost something like £0.3M to build then a bit under £100K per year to keep in working order (new batteries and motors, regular inspections and refurb, cost of the leak-proof warehouse it's stored in, etc).
I've met Pinker and it is my considered opinion that he is an elitist dick. (Sticks tongue out.) Srsly, not surprising that an eminent prof at Harvard provides emotional felatio for the moneyed class at every opportunity. @skillissuer
@dgerard If you're looking at awful.systems via a Mastodon client you never see the sidebar. Or even any indication that it isn't a Mastodon server.
@dgerard Whiteness is a movable feast. (Ask anyone who's Jewish, or LGBT+, or Italian/Irish in the USA in the 19th century or Hispanic in the USA before/after the 1970s).
The rapture *of* the Nerds, and I got the phrase from Ken MacLeod, who says he got it from someone else (but forgot who it was).
The design patterns of Christian fundamentalism show up strongly in singularitarianism (minus the God'n'Jeezus show). Not surprising given its ancestry lies in Russian Cosmism.
So advocating for "the uploaded" is like advocating for the souls of the elect in heaven, after the ain't-happened-yet Rapture.
@mattblaze@federate.social If you ever get a chance, you might want to try photographing the Torness AGR nuclear power station in Scotland close to sunrise or sunset. It's right on the coast (for seawater cooling), close by the A1(M) and east coast main line, and looks amazing in the right light (a 1980s-built temple of technology).