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6 Jul, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Provoking China to waste enormous resources on a space station and giant military is a fantastic way to get them to burn money they might otherwise use to embarrass us with a green economy or higher standard of living. globaltimes.cn/page/202107/12…
I know that the giant military is supposed to be used to scare Taiwan, but the idea that after a 40 year hiatus the PLA is going to go from getting its ass kicked by Vietnam to pulling off Normandy II strikes me as a stretch.
(In fairness I also believe that the US Army would fail in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan)
I saw some discussion in the press saying that if we leave Afghanistan, China might fill the "power vacuum", as if getting that government to burn trillions of dollars on futile empire-building instead of ours was a bad outcome.

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5 Jul
It's going to be fun when ransomware strikes a cryptocurrency. Some of the software this grift is built on is not at NASA avionics level of correctness, and there sure is a lot of money for the taking.
So-called "stablecoins" in particular (since they're backed with non-pretend assets) are just a progressive lottery for whoever can hack a cryptocurrency exchange or mining client fast enough.
The logical endpoint is to have smart ransomware contracts that live on yet another blockchain, to make it more difficult for authorities to shut down these attacks. And then metaransomware can attack that, recursively, until we reach full employment.
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2 Jul
"The U.S. has asked Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to take in about 9,000 Afghans who assisted with the American occupation." There are over 18,000 of these applicants, over 50,000 family members, and they deserve US green cards, not this weak shit. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Creating a large refugee group of the people who helped us most in Afghanistan, rather than simply welcoming them to America to our mutual benefit, shows the ineradicable xenophobia at the heart of all US policy in the Islamic world.
We know what happens when you let Syrians, Palestinians, Afghans, Yemenis, Somalis etc. become Americans. They build a new life, work their asses off, and help family back home like anyone else. Treating them like dangerous bacilli who must not enter US borders is disgraceful
Read 11 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
24 Jun
The best thing you can do to get through a checkpoint is to scale down this security theater, now in its 20th year of making us less free.
Someone needs to have the moral courage to restore the 9/11 status quo ante for passenger screening, or we'll be taking our shoes off and getting lotion confiscated down to the seventh generation.
My favorite example of TSA bullshit is the six-seat planes that fly to the town near my mom. The "checked" and "carry-on" bags go in the same compartment, and you sometimes physically sit in the co-pilot's seat at the controls, but they will make you throw out a bottle of water.
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Pinboard Profile picture
23 Jun
I love that the vertical moon dildo is still the official landing plan. This configuration was rejected in the sixties because the moon is lumpy and standing a pencil on its end is not the stablest way to land, but now we have computers and Elon says it's okay.
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22 Jun
Congress is also about to send itself home on the first of a series of recesses, just like it did at the height of the pandemic. You can't blame everything on Republicans if our elected Democratic majority refuses to stay in D.C. and do the work.
Two things in particular can't wait—massively expanding our vaccine production and exports, and saving the lives of thousands of Afghan citizens who helped us during the occupation and will be murdered if we don't let them immigrate. The lack of urgency and focus is deplorable
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21 Jun
I'm taking an entirely remote course this summer, so naturally they're requiring me to take an extensive online training about sexual health. I've been letting it autoplay in the background, but this caught my eye. The "and/or" here raises more questions than it answers.
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