@petrillic Right? What kind of idiot thinks to themselves, "I hear this is the scam du jour of criminals worldwide, I should get in on that."

@AccordionGuy Own your own shitheels, please, and take back Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk while you're at it.

Lovely "no real Scotsman" meme tho

@GottaLaff I was expecting their last name to be "Buttle"

Seems like oftentimes the first thing folks with strong mathematic skills and underdeveloped "humanities" skills do upon encountering a complex or ambiguous situation is to build a clean, well-defined model of their understanding, climb into it, and then lose sight of its fundamental insufficiency.

IDK, just thinking out loud about how often I see clever engineers espousing poorly-reasoned ideologies, and how often it seems to be the "the humanities are worthless" crowd doing it.

Cybersecurity is political. Period, end of story. If you could vote and didn’t bother because it was boring you’re just as responsible for loss of key research, ISAC funding, international collaboration, and federal jobs.

Same if you kept using X.

We warned you.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/politics/johns-hopkins-layoffs-usaid-funding/index.html

@gwynnion If only the booster rocket was the part that contains things like payloads and cockpits 😞

Imagine if the boy who cried wolf had actually seen a wolf every time, but by crying wolf he scared the wolf away. The villagers would show up, and there's this boy pointing at the forest and saying they just missed the wolf and weren't they lucky he had been there to warn them. And the villagers would probably take that badly, after the first time. They'd probably write a story about it.

Meanwhile, the boy is scared shitless. On the one hand, there's this fucking wolf who is getting more and more brazen. Maybe next time the boy won't be able to scare the wolf away. And then not only will the boy be in trouble, but the village will be in trouble. Meanwhile on the other hand he knows that if he keeps crying wolf, either the villagers will stop showing up at all, or they'll view him as a bigger problem than the wolf. Either way, the boy is going to be in deep shit there too.

You might forgive the boy for getting the fuck out of dodge. Let someone else watch for wolves. See how they like it. But he doesn't. He stays and watches, and the wolf comes back, and this time none of the boy's cries drive the wolf away because the wolf can sense that no one from the village is coming. And the villagers stand by and listen to the boy's increasingly desperate screams until it's too late.

Who's the hero of this story?

Now, if you were a villager who had just committed negligent homicide by wolf, which turned out to have been a very real risk, you could do two things. You could learn from this experience that sometimes warnings should be heeded regardless of whether they seem to be false alarms because it's better to go out to defend the flocks from a wolf a thousand times when there's no wolf than it is not to go once when there is. That's the sensible thing to do, certainly. The money is on overreacting if overreacting is low-cost and the risk of under-reacting is high.

Or you could write your story about this boy who fucked around and found out. That makes you look better, I guess. And it relieves you of responsibility for defense of the village and your livelihoods. The boy should have known better.

You may have figured out that I'm not talking about boys and wolves anymore.

We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where "crying wolf" is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what "to cry wolf" means, even if they've never actually heard the parable. We don't think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to "false positive." And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad.

Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves. We are victims of survivorship bias: we only remember the times when the warnings seemed unfounded because if they had been founded we wouldn't be here to notice. Fascism stalks the forest like a horde of hungry wolves, but because we only remember the times when fascism didn't eat us, we think all warnings are unfounded. Never mind that in most cases not only were the warnings founded but the action taken in response to those warnings was what kept fascism at bay.

Look at Y2K, which, if you're too young to remember, was something of a joke. It was regularly held up as a giant cry of wolf because, well, the world didn't end when the clock ticked over. Very little happened, really. So everyone breathed a sigh of relief and immediately set to work making sure that we forgot some inconvenient facts.

Y2K "didn't happen" because a lot of unappreciated work was done to keep it from happening. A lot. Far more than we were told in the general public. This was, after all, the era of Reaganomics, when the Democrat who was in office was about as conservative as a lot of Republicans were, where it seemed like everyone had a hardon for gutting government spending and bureaucracy. So the unsexy work of making sure that the world didn't end was just waste, right?

What about September 11, about a year later? Turns out that there were large numbers of boys who had been crying wolf about Al Qaeda for years, but a lot of unappreciated work was done in an attempt to keep that wolf at bay. It wasn't going in guns blazing, and it wasn't necessarily the ideal way to do it, but it also wasn't sexy so no one paid much attention.

Pandemics past have been averted and turned into jokes. Swine flu? Huge joke. Bird flu? Nothingburger. All wolves which failed to eat us, largely because someone cried and then unsexy work was done because of that warning. But we don't need the CDC. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. After all, what has it ever done for us? There was never a wolf to defend against.

We teach our children what we want them to know. And what we want them to know is that it's always worse to be an inconvenient Cassandra than a dead Tiresias. It's better to hold your tongue and let the wolf eat everything than it is to give a warning too soon, before you can see the whites of its eyes as it were. Keep your powder dry. Don't be too hasty.

And what's the life of one annoying boy, after all? And another. And another. Something keeps eating the boys you send out to watch the sheep, but as long as they don't cry, you don't have to deal with that. Teach your children silence. There might not be a wolf after all.

[EDIT TO POSTSCRIPT: There's good stuff in the replies. I know that fedi makes it hard to see replies sometimes, and I know that frequently replies are unreadable garbage anyway, but in this case several excellent points have been raised by people other than me which don't really work without context, but you're reading this so you have context, so go read them.]

@dangillmor Pinkertons? Truely the Robber Baron redux era

@GottaLaff
There is lot's of money for bombs for Israel, but not a dime for USAID. All because they were investigating Elmo for turning off Starlink In Ukraine to benefit Putin. 🤬 ☠️

@GottaLaff I am only going to say this once and it will be here: Not voting for dems has made everything worse than we imagined. Just know that all the information about anyone who was ever paid any amount by the US Treasury is now in the hands of Elon Musk. Fuck anyone who decided to withhold their vote.

Since nobody’s covering this stuff, I’ll do it.

This is from Hakeem Jeffries, Leader of the House Democratic Caucus.

My own U.S. House representative has been all over the district, and has called an emergency town hall for Thursday evening.

If you’re not seeing this in the same media that normalized and generally wanted Trump by all appearances, don’t be shocked.

Democrats are doing things, limited by the power voters didn’t bother to give them. That’s just the reality of the situation.

@EdCates @hacks4pancakes

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.

Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.

Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.

1/N

#BlackMastodon

@mhoye but only after the lightning stwikes

@mhoye Kill the wabbit?

@heidilifeldman Makes sense, he also supported the Nazi party seeking the presidency in the US.

@dannyjpalmer Did you play Dragon Age 2? It's a cross between that and Inquisition. It's absolutely nothing new for the series.

A lot of the criticism is from people who obviously have *not* played the previous games. It's not a perfect game, but it's very much a Dragon Age game.

8
Koontz: wow! can i have a porridge too?
Poe: no dean the british government system is very different than ours
Poe: see, in america, you can't get major political power by demonizing an oppressed minority
Barker: ah ha ha
Barker: edgar you don't joke much but when you do
Barker: to the bone ha ha

@mayaisloading I live in earthquake country. Cardboard is fantastic because when it falls on your head due to shaking apart, it provides a laugh instead of a concussion.

@jerry Yeah, they drank because of the lack of computers