BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Don't forget that rent is a fixed amount that you pay each month which includes stuff like repairs and home taxes etc. (in some countries, but alas, not the UK) while mortgages though are a lower bound on your housing costs because you're responsible for all the repairs and taxes etc.
The solution, as always, is beatings. Operant conditioning works on dogs, it absolutely should work on the psychotic homeless too regardless of how poor their rational reasoning skills are (unless society is willing to admit these people are less capable of reasoning than Fido, which it will never do).
Create a rule where any homeless person publicly under the influence of drugs or caught doing them is subjected to half a dozen lashes delivered ASAP and you'll very quickly get these people associating drugs with pain no different to how they associate drugs with a high right now and a good portion of them will stop quickly.
And for the small proportion that doesn't? Well given that they've now demonstrated they can't conform to a basic principle followed by pretty much all mammals instinctively (avoid doing things that lead to punishment) you can use this as evidence of them being certifiably insane and use it to lock them up for a very long time.
And they will use homeless as a pawn.
Finally a productive socially net positive use for the lumpenproles!
These are the French we're talking about. Famously the country with one of the largest tax to GDP ratios in the world. Cutting off the ability for their government to function (and thus extract even more tax to fund even more spending) is like taking a fish out of water. It's gonna hurt.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
One thing I've always liked about Macron how willing he is to put the common man in his place and his actions over the last month have only solidified this view. A substantial minority of the French threw a far right tantrum in the EU elections and they are going to be punished for it with total government deadlock over the next year at least. Here's hoping next time around they see sense (the pessimist in me knows though that it'll take at least a few more rounds of "treatment" before they behave).
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Canon EOS-R5. Excellent camera body.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Say it in hushed tones but I think the European far right has a ceiling of 30-35% because the rest of society will make any compromises necessary to keep them out of any real power (we saw what happened the last time). In the end they'll be loud and a thorn in everyone's sides but utterly and completely insignificant in therms of how much power they wield. I think Macron was completely correct to call out the voter's bluff and slap down Le Pen by proxy.
People noticed how the UK's election saw our far right Reform party get less than 1% of the seats on around 15% of the vote and they talk about how FPTP stops extremists but a part of me feels that because of FPTP the UK is one of the few places where the far right could ever end up welding significant power because unlike Europe where 35% gets you 35% of the seats and no power here 35% (or less) can give you a large majority to enact whatever laws you want.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Funnily enough the African slaves who were sent to the US had it good in their new countries compared to the fates of those who were unlucky enough to be sent to the Caribbean or Brazil to break their backs on sugar plantations. If anything the Caribbean descendants should be eligible for first class tickets on the US racial gravy train.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
I voted Labour. I'm basically a single issue voter on housing and infrastructure at the moment and the Labour party is the only one with a remotely credible plan (now it remains to be seen how far they go towards implementing it).
Abolish the green belt yesterday!
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
this paranoia reminds me of the book "I, Claudius". Read it, if you haven't!
Seconding the recommendation for I, Claudius.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
If you're going the IVF route seriously consider getting your embryos screened for autism via Orchid genomics. It costs about $1200 per embryo but can easily save you hundreds of thousands in money and emotional worry from having to deal with an autistic child for life.
No links to Orchid, they're just the only ones I know who do polygenic screening for tism at the moment.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
4mo ago
Now imagine you'd lost the old phone or it got stolen. You'd basically have lost your Google account there and then. It's one big reason why I'm not a fan of TOTP methods that don't allow me to register on multiple devices as a backup plan in case my main one becomes unusable for whatever reason.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The UK doesn't require SIM card registration. Just get a cheap physical SIM from your nearest small scale mobile phone store and go to another one of them and get a £25 dumb Nokia. Put SIM card inside Nokia and you're good to go.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
though it sounds like OP is probably most concerned about levels 1-4
Nah, I'm not that concerned about government agencies, I've already made peace with the fact that if they come after me there's nothing I can do. I'm more concerned about your average journ*list etc. wanting to gather info on me.
I hate the antichrist!
Modern technology is in dire need of modern solutions
Our story starts a few days ago when I changed the IP address of the VPN I use to connect to my BurdensomeCount accounts and identity. This is a fairly regular thing I do for Opsec reasons. I also scramble the MAC address of my devices every once in a while, same reason. Normally this is all fine and dandy except that last time I decided to do both of these things together. Looking back this was a very bad idea indeed. While minor minutae of misfortunes I've had to face in my daily life aren't worth making a mottepost on my struggles over those pained few hours, if only for didactic reasons about the current state of modern large technology companies and the decay of the anonymous free internet, are well worth writing about.
On Saturday I tried to log into my discord account for a voice game of Blood on the Clocktower (on a server that originally sprung up from The Motte so populated by smart people, it's quite a fun way to spend an afternoon if you have nothing better to do). After inputting my email address and password and solving the captcha- these days they're using one with a picture containing multiple objects, all but one of which are in pairs, so like 2 trucks in the image, 2 lions in the image, one rabbit and you have to click on the unpaired object to pass- Discord did the whole "new login location detected, please check your email address" thing, all well and expected because of my VPN reset.
At this point I went to Gmail to log in. Email address, check; Password, check; no issues here. Since I was using a new IP and MAC Gmail asked for an extra security check before they let me in: they wanted a mobile phone number to send me a 6 digit code. This was the first sign that something was wrong: I didn't even have a mobile phone associated to this account so why was Gmail asking for a phone number? Like seriously, why do you need me to associate a phone number before you let me into my own account? I tried to see if there was a way around this but apparently not, Google wanted a phone number or it was no dice for me.
Obviously I didn't want to provide my registered phone number linked to me in real life but fortunately I have a burner phone. I gave Gmail one of my burner numbers and got the code from Google. Note that since I didn't have any associated phone numbers with the account anyone could have used literally any phone they had lying around for this so it's not like this was providing any real security benefit to my account against intruders, it was all a charade for Google to get its hand on a phone number. I was medium annoyed at this but I had a voice game to play so let it slide. I got my six digit code and put it in, only to be told:
Google couldn’t verify this account belongs to you. Try again later or use Account Recovery for help.
No shit you couldn't verify this account belongs to me when I don't even have a phone number associated with the account? What possible reason related to identity verification could you have to ask me for a phone number in the first place?
It was off to Account Recovery for me. Google again wanted my email address and password, which I provided. I also had some security questions registered to my account that I knew the answers to but Google didn't even bother asking me about them, instead taking me straight to:
You didn’t provide enough info for Google to be sure that this account is really yours. Google asks for this info to keep your account secure.
If possible, when signing in: Use a device where you’ve signed in before Use a familiar Wi-Fi network, such as at home or work
and leaving me at a complete blank wall. My only reaction at this point was WTF?? Locking people out of their accounts when they've forgotten their ID details is one thing, but doing it to someone who remembers literally every single piece of identity information associated with their account is a whole new level of bastardry. Do no evil indeed.
All this meant I needed a new Discord account, which meant a new disposable email account as well, and I needed it fast, the games were starting in less than half an hour. I wasn't gonna create another Gmail account after their recent treatment so I went to what I thought was the provider most open to anonymous accounts and least likely to pull another Google on me: Protonmail.
Fortunately making a new account with Protonmail was fast and without issue. I took this new email and tried to use it to create a Discord account. Discord though was much less nice. Firstly it wanted all the standard details: username, email, date of birth (1st Jan 1984 in case anyone is curious) and password. Before making the account it wanted me to verify I was human: it was time for another captcha but that wasn't enough to sate Eris, she also wanted me to verify my phone number to create an account, which as usual I didn't want to provide for Opsec reasons.
At this point I was already feeling some burnout so tabbed over to other stuff for a few minuets. When I came back it was to the landing page Discord has for all new accounts where they tell you about how they are a worse IRC clone and try to upsell you into buying Nitro (but hey, at least it's still better than Slack). Thinking I had lucked through somehow and wouldn't need to go through the whole phone number charade and was home safe I closed these popups but instead of the expected stuff I was presented with the login screen again. It looked like I had timed out instead on the previous screen and would need to login again into the new account.
No matter, at least I was getting somewhere. I put in my new email and password and hit "Log in", only to be rewarded with "Wait! Are you human?". It was captcha time again. I got my burner phone ready and clicked on the rabbit, just about having had it with Discord. Time was ticking, the game was about to start soon and I didn't want to miss out on the first round.
Your Account has been disabled
Fuck me with a pointed stick. Why has this account been disabled when it's never been properly logged into ever in the first place? What possible reason could you have for disabling the account? No phone number? In that case why not just ask for one instead of nixing the account straight up? I hadn't got the time to seethe here so I went straight back to the account creation screen. Since the previous attempt had failed to create a working account I tried to create another one only to be told "Email is already registered", but not before going through another round of captchas.
Great, because I had the temerity to switch over to another tab for a few minutes you've now basically made it impossible to use my email address with discord forever. Normally at this point I'd have gone outside and touched grass to cool off a bit but there wasn't any time for that right now. I immediately went back to Protonmail and created a new account then returned to Discord signing up for another shiny new account with my shiny new email. One more captcha later I was back to the "verify your phone number page". This time I had my burner in hand and gave Eris my number post haste prior to her fickle nature banishing me again only to be met with another "Wait! Are you human?" before she'd send me the six digit code needed to gain access to her inner valuables.
I got the code and typed the digits in one by one, then hit enter. My reward for this was, yep, you guessed it, another captcha. These newfangled automatic registration bots must be getting really good now at inserting themselves directly into the middle of the process given that you need to verify your humanity basically every other click.
Even this was not enough to satisfy her, she wanted me to verify my email as well before letting me in. I clicked on the button to send a verification email only to be presented with yet another captcha. This was too much, I was one sliver away from going full REEEEEE now: Verification can was supposed to be a meme you guys, not an accurate description of reality! Nevertheless I kept my composure, clicked on the rabbit and waited for the fated email to arrive.
Instead of the signup email from Discord I was expecting I got one from Protonmail instead:
Dear User,
Thank you for your interest in our service.
Our system has flagged third-party service registration emails shortly after your account creation, which goes against the intended use of our service and may indicate disposable account usage.
We've implemented these measures to enhance the overall reputation of Proton Mail. This helps protect our domain and prevents the risk of our IP being banned by third-party services, which could affect service availability for all users.
Currently, your account has some limitations, restricting its use for registering on third-party services.
To remove these limitations, you will need to add a verified recovery email address or phone number, or consider upgrading your account.
Learn more about how to verify your account recovery methods here: https://proton.me/support/set-account-recovery-methods.
Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.
Best regards,
The Proton Anti-Abuse Team
WTF???????? The fact that you knew this was a registration email from Discord implies that you have scanned my email. I thought one of the unique selling points of Protonmail was that you were so privacy focused to the point that everything was encrypted and if governments served you a warrant you wouldn't ever have any info about your customer's emails beyond their encrypted inbox you couldn't do anything about. Scanning their emails is about the biggest breach of trust possible here. And it turns out you aren't just doing it when your hand is forced by the government (understandable) but willingly to make some extra pieces of lucre.
What's even the point of Protonmail then if you're going to be just as bad as the big providers when it comes to privacy but also provide a paltry amount of free storage compared to what they give, and we haven't even started talking about how you gimp new accounts or your sketchy and misleading advertising (they say new free accounts get 1GB storage but it's actually only 500MB by default with the rest requiring you to set up autoforwarding from your gmail account to use their UI and also download their app; oh and to create a sense of FOMO you only have 15 days to do this or you're forever stuck at 500MB).
I remember the days when you used to have two passwords for protonmail, one to download your encrypted mailbox from the site and then the other to decrypt the mailbox locally on your own machine. Oh how you people have fallen. I used to be highly supportive of them in the past but after seeing this I would't piss on them if their servers were on fire.
And of course by now Discord had timed out again and my fledgling account had been disabled. I would have to start the process from the beginning and go through the captcha gauntlet one more time. I was legit malding now, why did they have to make it so fucking hard to create a usable discord account? I was close to giving up by now, no clocktower game was worth this much strife.
Eventually I had to go to Microsoft and create an Outlook email to be able to create a functioning Discord account. I had just about given up and didn't expect much from them but surprisingly the process with them was completely smooth. All those capchas by the end though had me channelling my inner Elmer Fudd and I was just about ready to kill that damn rabbit. I noticed quite wryly that in the year 2024 AD Microsoft, that old bogeyman of the 90s, was somehow more OK with completely anonymous accounts than services which a few short years ago were loudly trumpeting how pro-anonymity they were.
But even now I was not home safe. I may finally have had a working Discord account but still needed an invite to the BOTC server because surprise surprise my last link had expired. Even though we're an open fun server that's happy to welcome pretty much anyone from rdrama/themotte in 2022 Discord got rid of permanent non-expiring invitation links unless the owner designates it as a "community server" which means giving Discord full rights to scan all content as well as getting it listed on a public directory on the discord website (not a good thing for us, the server's culture risks getting run over). This means we are forced to rely on invite links that expire every seven days...
This change by Discord making user experience worse sounds completely nonsensical until you realize that Discord wants to compete with other established social media sites like Twitter. That means they're trying to incentivise people to spend as much time as possible on their site and pushing community servers that people can self discover is one way of doing it (same reason they switched to fixed usernames). These incentives also have a side effect of Discord cannibalizing other smaller discussion sites like drama where Aevann who runs rdrama.net now hardblocks links to them because they very noticeably siphon off conversations and people; I can't say this policy is wrong either, something like it is probably necessary for the long term health of the site.
In the end I ended up messaging multiple different people I knew to be on the server and very obliquely asking them for an invite link (because I didn't want my messages to get filtered), hoping one of them would respond so I could join my game. Fortunately @everyone saw my message and I was able to join the game, but not before he got his drama account temp shadowbanned for falling afoul of the Discord filter. After wandering the modern technological desert I had eventually made it to the promised land, but not without half a headache and an intense burning hatred inside of me for the way these big companies operate...
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Where's Rekieta's NYT article?
The wider world of normies really needs to know more about his saga, it's hilarious!
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
This is very good. I recommend reading it for everyone who wants to learn more about population genetics.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
I agree that America could annex Canada with little to no military effort.
The best defense Canada has against getting annexed by the US is to import an extra 20 million South Asians (even better: an extra 40 million). The magnitude of the poison pill the US would have to swallow to get the land for itself would make even the staunchest American imperialist balk and puke.
In fact a large portion of these 40 million people will want the US to annex Canada because it means they get full access to the US jobs market!
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident.
All smart and sensible.
And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft.
Eh, there's a lot you can get done by being nice and soft if you're good at social manipulation. I'd say from experience it's easier to leverage nice+soft into getting what you want than disagreeable+hard.
Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots.
And now you've completely veered off into the deep end.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
The negative long term societal impact of poor people having children
Some people here may have heard about the short story The Egg by Andy Weir. It's really brief and takes about 2 minutes to read; spoliers below so Caveat lector.
The central premise of The Egg is about a human being ("You", it's written in second person) who just died and is taken to see God. He is told that the whole universe was created specifically as a learning experience for You (who is actually a God in training) and that every single human being is infact a different incarnation of yourself. At the very end God explains to You that "Every time you hurt/helped another you were hurting/helping yourself" with the author's intended moral being something like "therefore you should always help others and be generous etc. etc.".
Naturally being a terminal contrarian I completely disagree. Being someone who wants to minimise the total amount I suffer integrated out to inifinity if I truely knew that I would live eventually every single human life the best thing to do would be to prevent those incarnations of myself most likely to produce progeny who live shitty lives from reproducing in the first place.
Sure, forcibly sterilising people would inflict suffering upon them (and therefore myself) for some small number of years before the reverse hedonic treadmill runs its course, but preventing three kids who were probably going to lead shitty lives were they to be born from existing just saved me two centuries of misery in expectation. This is a trade I'd make again and again until it got to a situation where only well off/intelligent people were allowed to have children for the next generation. By doing this I'd prevent the existance of most of the shitty human lives I'd have lived in the first place, plus the lack of deadweight from these shitty existances needing subsidy from productive humans would mean I could race full steam ahead to grow the economy/research technology without a horde of poors needing to be bribed with gibs so that they don't burn the cities down.
This course of action would basically be the fastest way to create heaven on earth, and when I got to that point I could proliferate an arbitrarily large number of top end humans living in complete bliss (eugenics from controlling who could breed basically filtered out the shitty variants long before this point). Note that the process doesn't require You to be perfectly good at choosing who to sterilize, accidentally sterilizing the wrong people has negative impacts (or even worse, not sterilizing those you should sterilize) but you still get benefits as long as you're dispropotionately sterilizing low value humans.
The story doesn't make You live out your lives in chronological order on earth so basically I could ensure >99.9999% of my time is spent living in one of these complete bliss lives only punctuated by very small amounts of time in a less nice (but still comparatively nicer than if everyone was allowed to have kids, no matter how shitty their lives would have been) existance. All in all it'd be a pretty decent ride, certainly far better than the counterfactual with no forced sterilisation.
I suspect that Weir, who describes his views as "socially liberal" wouldn't quite like this "degenerate" solution to the universe he created. Regardless it remains true that "sterilize shitty people for a better world" is just as valid a moral to take from the story as "help others and be generous".
But this is all just a short story set in a hypothetical universe that doesn't have much to do with our own. However the more I thought about my solution the more I realised it applied to our physical world too, regardless of whether or not we're all secretly one single soul sequentially reincarnating into all the human bodies. For instance right now people on the left complain about "Child Poverty" and how this is a Big Problem That Society Needs To Fix.
The left's preferred solution (like it is often elsewhere) is something like redistribution from those who earn a lot/have wealth to those that don't. This isn't the only solution though, because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly. Not only this but since poors are disproportionately likely to make bad/absent parents this would ensure the average child is more likely to be born into a family situation conducive to good childhood and less likely to lead them into becoming a burden on the state when they grow up.
Of course even suggesting that we should discourage (not even sterilize, merely discourage) poors from having kids is something that makes these very same people on the left quite angry, even though it would go some way towards solving child poverty. Plus the saved money from not needing to subsidise the poors as much could be easily diverted into investment and research, thereby improving humanity as a whole.
Equally people complain about wealth concentration amongst the rich and inequality. Once again if we had a society which encouraged the rich to have children while discouraging the poor we'd get a situation where richer people would on average have larger families and therefore when it came to time for the inheritance to be dished out the wealth of the rich would get diluted while the wealth of the poors would pass on mostly intact.
And of course if rich people had more kids on average compared to poor people we'd get the standard eugenic benefits of the next generation carrying fewer shitty traits on average than the previous one, reverse idiocracy if you will. While the effects of this would be minor on human level timescales when you zoom out to multiple centuries they add up quite quickly.
I've only talked about a few areas here but most modern day western problems can in some way be linked to poor people having kids. We'd all be a lot better off if governments around the world nudged them away from this and instead encouraged the rich to have kids instead. Of course since we live in a fallen world this is basically the opposite of current policy in the UK where if you earn too much your childcare benefits get taken away. Faceplam moment...
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
the Marubo are already grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years
They don't have a hope in hell, do they?
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
That's not insider trading as it's usually defined. Insider trading is more like knowing your company had a good quarter and so buying shares before publicly releasing this news.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards
None of this implies we can let up in our fight against it. Wokeness is like kudzu, if you leave even a single vine intact it'll come back, and faster than you think.
BurdensomeCount
Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now.
5mo ago
If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime."
You don't think insider trading should be considered a crime?
This is a hangup the the people of the US need, ahem, beat out of them.
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