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Oberleutnant posted:Snow Crash is a bad book It's Stephenson's best work.
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Feb 28, 2017 19:31
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Carecat posted:How do we employ 10,000 people between MI5 and GCHQ? That's nearly half the number of the Pentagon which has an enormous military and bloated military spending. No wonder it costs us over 1 billion a year. Erm... the Pentagon employs something like a million people. Are you sure you don't mean the NSA? Even then that's at least 30k people - 6 times as many as GCHQ, which is it's UK equivalent, which lines up pretty well given the UK has about a fifth of the population of the US. As for MI5, FBI and DHS, which do it's job in the US (albeit with a lot more jobs too) employ more people than all the intelligence and police agencies in the UK. Also the budget for the two is probably a lot lower than that (£2.5bn for the Single Intelligence Budget which is shared between MI5, MI6, GCHQ, JTAC and DIS - MI6 in particular cost a lot of money, all that cash for smart suits, Aston Martins, and paternity cases). That's less than *avowed* intelligence budgets of the US three-letter agencies and given at least 95% of their budgets are entirely black... For comparison, a billion quid is more or less what NRO pays on satellite launches alone (assuming they pay market rates for their publicly-avowed launches). I mean you can certainly argue over whether or not they deliver value for money (or if they should exist at all) but if your only comparison is America we come out pretty loving well.
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Feb 28, 2017 19:45
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goddamnedtwisto posted:MI6 in particular cost a lot of money, all that cash for smart suits, Aston Martins, and paternity cases).
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Feb 28, 2017 20:04
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Is anyone else's Labour Party quarterly newsletter called THE COMRADE, or is it just my constituency?
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Feb 28, 2017 20:04
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Are you sure you're on the correct mailing list?
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Feb 28, 2017 20:42
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who would win in a fight between trotskyite infiltrators and murdoch aligned blairite plotters?
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Feb 28, 2017 22:20
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The Tories.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:21
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JFairfax posted:Are you sure you're on the correct mailing list? if imgur wasn't making GBS threads the bed, then I'd link the thing but as far as the email goes it looks fairly official
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Feb 28, 2017 22:25
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Since it's quiet again, here's something else from the archives: A UKIP FAQ, circa 1998 - http://web.archive.org/web/19981207043535/http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Ian_Soulsby/krsoulsby/ukip.htm. I like this part:quote:Q What is your alternative to being a member of the EU?
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Feb 28, 2017 23:24
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I can't get enough of are Dan
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and i must meme posted:who would win in a fight between trotskyite infiltrators and murdoch aligned blairite plotters? Yaldabaoth and his legions of flesh.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:24
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and i must meme posted:who would win in a fight between trotskyite infiltrators and murdoch aligned blairite plotters? OwlFancier posted:The Tories. Regarde Aduck posted:Yaldabaoth and his legions of flesh. Regarde Aduck you got beaten friend EDIT: actually I think Yaldabaoth offers p. good healthcare and cosmic horrors are unionised
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Feb 28, 2017 23:29
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As opposed to cosmic rays, which are usually ionised.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:44
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I would vote for a union secretary named Cosmic Raymond.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:49
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That sounds like an Amiga game.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:53
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I'd probably vote literal lovecraftian starspawn over human politicians at this point. At least they have a plan, and the means to enact it. Sure they're unspeakable horrors whose very sight breaks the mind, but at least they didn't invent stuff like synthetic CDOs.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:04
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Maybe they did. I've often thought that large enough groups of people have emergent behaviors that can lead to outcomes that no individual member of the group wants, less like a hive mind and more like a systems theory of emergence tacked to sociological phenomena. Twin this with the idea that we all know that suffering is bad and if we all universally took certain actions we could reduce it significantly, but on the swarm scale we refuse to because some other bastard would gain the upper hand and we see ourselves hanging over a heaving Darwinian pit of suffering. That seems pretty close to the Zapffean cosmic horror of Ligotti.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:10
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The stars have been right for a couple decades now but the truth is Cthulhu is loving terrified.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:13
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Killed By Death posted:Hillary Clinton: Just Too Left Wing You can't think of maybe, say, one wacko/protest vote/out there far left candidate who might have gotten their stink on the DNC last year?
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Mar 1, 2017 00:49
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I'd rather thousands of people who can make auditable decisions curate our nation's national security intelligence than letting inscrutable AIs (owned and sold by private for profit companies) do the task.
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Mar 1, 2017 01:00
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Maybe the reality is the worst case of thousands of inscrutable people (some owned and sold by private for profit companies) doing it. New thread is up.
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Mar 1, 2017 01:03
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