SF author, no longer active on X.
FOLLOW ME ON MASTODON: https://t.co/FKZw6CxioC
Blog: see URL. (Inactive on twitter.)
Email: charlie.stross (at) gmail.
7 subscribers
Oct 2, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Any reasonable "plan for growth" for the UK needs to start with funding for free meals for children, from childcare through secondary school—and also a drastic rise in the education budget. Childhood malnutrition stunts physical and intellectual growth, cripples the workforce.
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While I'm on that topic, sick people can't work. We need to renationalize the NHS, properly fund it, BEGIN training the next cohort of healthcare workers (it takes a decade), and take COVID19 seriously: HEPA air filtration everywhere, masks in unventilated or crowded spaces.
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Jun 24, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The trouble with utopian struggles is you can't create utopia: utopia can never fail, it can only be failed. And in event of failure, the zealots always double-down.
We've seen this in the UK with Brexit.
Now we're going to see it from Christian Dominionists in the USA.
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It's going to get REALLY ugly.
Roe v. Wade is just the beginning.
All the progressive legislation of the past century is up for grabs.
Only there's a modern surveillance tech state to tap for enforcement.
And McConnell, Pence talking about a federal abortion ban.
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May 8, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Big idea here:
The US right's war on abortion is part of a bigger fight—their war on the Enlightenment era concept of rights. (Alito's ruling puts a lot of other rights at risk, not just abortion.)
The solution is a basic right to bodily autonomy and self-determination.
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The right to bodily autonomy means that you, and nobody else, have the right to control your own body.
Nobody should be allowed to torture you, harvest your organs, perform surgery on you without consent, force you to be pregnant against your will, or brainwash you.
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May 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
A trolley problem variant:
A streetcar is out of control and is heading down a line where it will kill two people. However, it's about to cross points where you can divert it onto a track where it will only kill one person.
Do you pull the switch?
HINT: this is a trick question!
Because the trolly problem I'm talking about is called an ectopic pregnancy.
In an ectopic pregnancy the embryo implants outside the uterus. It's a disaster: both the mother and embryo will die.
Boris Johnson was installed solely to deliver a hard Brexit. He was to be the fall guy when things went wrong.
But COVID unexpectedly gave him a new crisis to cling to.
The lie that COVID is over means Boris is no longer needed.
So the Owners want rid of him.
He's a clown, a patsy, an unscrupulous money-grubbing hack, and therefore easy for the real controllers to manipulate.
As for who they are …? Look to the press barons and the private equity oligarchs who made bank under Brexit and COVID.
Apr 14, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Midlife crisis. Musk can't buy a supercar (he's got a supercar *factory*) and the hot pop starlet girlfriend dumped him for Chelsea Manning, so what's a bro gonna do? Shitpost!
He'll wake up with a hangover in a Vegas hotel suite, with a jacuzzi full of Krug and hookers, someone else's kidney, and Facebook, after Bezos outbids him for Twitter just to fuck with his head.
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(Now with keyboard): Putin doesn't need to play nice with Western public opinion any more, so we're getting to see the unvarnished truth. Which is ugly AF. Totalitarian, racist, fascist, eliminationist rhetoric towards anyone who doesn't bow down before him.
Jan 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Dozens of protesters and police dead amid Kazakhstan unrest
— Cryptocurrency miners displaced from China (after a ban) spiked energy consumption triggering prices rises, leading to revolutionary violence: theverge.com/2021/11/27/228…theguardian.com/world/2022/jan…
Crypto mining consumed 8% of Khazak power in 2021, and spiked in November, resulting in an uprising that caused hundreds of deaths and injuries and destabilized a government.
This is why I hate cryptocurrency grifters. There's blood on their hands.
The worst case for COVID is that we get semiannual mutant escape pandemics which kill about 1% of victims, until we get better vaccines with universal worldwide rollout faster than the infection/mutation loop, OR a wide-spectrum vaxx/antiviral. Could be decades …
If you have a 1%/year chance of dying, BUT the pandemic keeps burning indefinitely, then after 35 years you're at about a 50% cumulative chance of being dead. That's a European Black Death level plague in slow motion. We can't afford that.
So …
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Nov 11, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I sense the USAF is grappling valiantly with a shortage suitably militaristic code names for weapons programs ...
Mind you, in my experience kittens can best be described as "fluffy self-propelled barbed wire with anti-gravity", so maybe not that inappropriate a name for a USAF weapons program after all.
Oct 21, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
From about 2001-2010 I used to get startups emailing me excitedly about their plan to “disrupt publishing” and asking me to hype their new platform.
Then I had to explain that publishing is really all about supply chain contract management for paper products …
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The ascent of the ebook distro channel has mixed things up a bit, but essentially you’re dealing with a supply chain, b2b contracts all the way from author to bookstore, and if you ignore paper produce you’re ignoring 50% of the revenue stream.
Worse …
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Oct 18, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just remembered there's an Apple Unleashed event right now.
Airpods 3: don't need (got Airpods Pro).
M1Pro and M1Max: definitely going to be one in my next laptop. But not buying next laptop until I'm traveling again, so not this year.
This stuff looks crazy fast. If I wanted a Linux laptop I'd get better performance by buying one of the new Macbook Pros and running Linux in a VM on top of macOS rather than on bare metal Intel.
Oct 11, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
OK, that is IT. I am OFFICIALLY fed up with British Telecom and Openreach, the corporate broadband equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.
You know how sometimes authors write people they hate into their novels? BT/Openreach are on my shit list for the final Laundry Files book.
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Note that the last Laundry Files novel will not happen before (a) New Management books 2 and 3, and (b) a Laundry Files short story collection. So, 2024 at the earliest.
… But revenge is a dish best eaten cold.
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Sep 13, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Just been reading the transcript of Nicola Sturgeon’s speech at the SNP conference today and … welp, there it is: deal with COVID19, then full speed ahead for an independence referendum with rejoining the EU as an implicit outcome.
(Scotland polls at 70-75% anti-Brexit.)
I suspect the outcome of the Alba split has convinced SNP strategists that they don’t need the party’s right wing/pro-Brexit wing any more. And hitching independence to EU membership will gain them more votes than it loses.
Sep 3, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Overflowing bins: is anybody else getting deja vu for the Winter of Discontent (1978-79)?
Also in the news: Waitrose lorry drivers now earning more than solicitors, care workers in England taking 30% pay rises as Amazon warehouses recruit them to pack boxes, fruit rotting in the fields, inflation in the economic forecasts.
Back to the 1970s! Stagflation ahoy!
Sep 3, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Meet IBM's new 5GHz 256-core mainframe:
"… Telum also introduces a 6TFLOPS on-die inference accelerator. It's intended to be used for—among other things—real-time fraud detection during financial transactions."
Mainframes still ain't dead.
arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/0…
For non-initiates: the big difference between a mainframe and your PC/Mac isn’t clock speed—it’s fault tolerance and data throughput. Fault tolerance: if a bank of RAM or a CPU core fails, the mainframe won’t lose data or running processes. Data: take your PC and add six zeroes.
Aug 24, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
In case it’s not obvious: I’ve been juggling TWO giant series since 1999-2002: the Laundry Files, and the Merchant Princes.
MP got a reboot as Empire Games in 2014 (aka Merchant Princes: The Next Generation) but will have run its course (as of “Invisible Sun“).
But …
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The Laundry Files story arc isn’t quite over: there are a couple of novellas and at least one more full novel to go to finish it.
But it’s on hiatus while I start an overlapping spin-off series, Tales of the New Management. Starts with “Dead Lies Dreaming”, then …
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Aug 22, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Welp, I am informed a BT engineer will call tomorrow between 8am and 1pm to upgrade my fibre connection.
I’m not normally awake before 10am because I get to set my own working hours and am not a morning person.
So, obviously, they’ll show up at 2pm, right?
So, an update:
A BT engineer tried to phone my mobile at 8:20 but dropped through to voice mail (poor signal) and didn't leave a message.
BT's billing system then tried to ding me £130 for a missed appointment.
Hint: I was home and waiting for the doorbell to ring all along.
Aug 17, 2021 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I just remembered I’m supposed to use this hellsite to promote my work. Well alrighty: I have two novels and a novella coming out in the next six months!
Invisible Sun drops on Sept 30th! (The last Empire Games book)
US: amazon.com/Invisible-Sun-…
UK: amazon.co.uk/Invisible-Sun-…
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Next book after Invisible Sun is Quantum of Nightmares, the second New Management book sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming (misfiled as Laundry Files book 11 in the US). Coming on January 11th:
The BBC is isomorphic with late Brezhnev-era Pravda, only in English, this century. State propaganda mouthpiece and a distraction from what’s really going on, which is the decay of a de-facto one-party state as it rots from inside.
The UK preserves the form of democracy but not the substance, since 1979. Labour can only achieve power (as under Blair) by wholeheartedly adopting and continuing Conservative policies. We’ve had 42 years of Conservativism and nobody much under 60 remembers anything else.
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Apr 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and go completely Russian, and just sit on a stove and moan all day“
— straight out of 1928, and reads like a hot take on 2016-2021.
Dorothy Parker reviewing Mussolini’s pot-boiler puts me in mind of Saddam Hussein’s SF novel and Muammar Qadaffi’s poetry. In hindsight, the Hitler Diaries were a bit implausible—but if Norman Spinrad had tried to pass off “Lord Of The Swastika” as real…
