@amsomniac
Xerox employees? Xerox employees?

Whoa. Good story, if depressing. https://www.tor.com/2013/05/07/we-have-always-lived-on-mars/

@kara Like, in the first movie where they are jumping down into the atmosphere to land on a saucer section and they have no weapons, and Sulu finds a sword. Okay, cool.
Then they get there and bad guys come out and ... one of the bad guys also has a sword. Why the fuck? I mean, *clearly* so they can have a sword fight. That's literally the only reason. Way to treat the audience like bloody idiots.

@kara Yeah, you have to care about the characters *before* you get the issues. Bad writing otherwise.
I hated the Abrams movies because **they made no fucking sense at all**

@kara Fair criticism. And Isaacs' character is a psychopath, so you have a full set there. (Although at least he's professional...)

@kara @fridgebuzznow
Your arms will hurt...

@kara If you can get past the long scenes in the first two episodes with actors struggling to speak Klingon through their mouth prosthetics ... it gets better. ( And those scenes have a rather unexpected payoff.)
But despite being set 10 years before TOS, it never feels anything like TOS. That might put you off.

(oops) expecting to. It's very good indeed. Just, not in the same universe as TOS. (They lost that at "phasers to kill", sorry.)

Confession: I really like Star Trek Discovery. I wasn't expecting t

Wow, this person has made some AMAZING #opensource / #programming art:

https://github.com/jstpcs/lnxpcs

My favorites are attached.

Due to various stuff including some twitter posts that turned up out of the blue, I'm now homesick for a town I've not lived in for forty years.

Surprisingly good Twitter thread on ablist language (said the 'abled' guy) from someone that maintains a resource on that: https://twitter.com/autistichoya/status/984953252818145280
TLDR: just because a word is ablist doesn't mean it's always right to call someone out for using it.

@Trev @shadowfirebird @KitRedgrave
Well, no, you don't have to care if it's a good rule of thumb. That's how a heuristic works, after all… :)

@Trev @KitRedgrave
Always remembering, of course, that choosing to care more about people than heuristics is itself a heuristic…

@chi505 @shadowfirebird @Laurelai @seanl
IIRC inflation at 20% meant working class folk became destitute. Wages failed to rise. Banks wouldn't lend. That was the *plan* -- it was designed to break the unions and the working class, and it worked.

@chi505 @shadowfirebird @Laurelai @seanl
I don't think anyone is suggesting scrip should *replace* fiat? (Getting those terms the right way round now!) But local currency continues to be a thing, and I for one think that some diversity here has serious benefits (to the people, not the state…)
We keep hearing that cash is on the way out. For my money (sic) that's a serious privacy issue. We'll need something to replace it…

@chi505 @Laurelai @seanl @shadowfirebird
(Back from work.)
Much of this whizzes charmingly above my head, but I will say this about interest: I well remember when the UK government, through planning or stupidity, allowed the bank lending rate to get to 18% (at the same time as inflation was 20%, and that *was* deliberate). Maybe giving the state control of the single currency available is …too much power?

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
Argh, sorry, yes, I'm exactly 180° wrong. 6:40am here. The term I'm thinking of is "scrip". Bitcoin was supposed to be scrip, not fiat currency. It's not suitable as such.
I stand by what I said, just with … different words? :D

@Laurelai @shadowfirebird @seanl @kara
well, if there is a central authority and it's the government, then it's not *fiat* currency. :) If you don't like the idea of fiat currency then you're unlikely to like bitcoin. Which is fair enough.