As a believer in self-ownership, I accept that one has a right to end one’s life. I also believe no one should be compelled to participate in such an undertaking or even agree with the notion. I even think there is a place for those who are dying (I’m not sure this was a terminal condition, but that is beside the point) to be able to tell their stories; this can be an important component of ending one’s life. However, there is something I find very creepy about this “Bernays-ification” of such an event.
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What strikes me about this is not just that it’s creepy (which it is), but rather that it’s an awfully weird message for a family-owned retailer specialising in youth-oriented “fast fashion” to be spending its money to send. I can just imagine Don Draper of Mad Men confidently striding up to a flip chart and opening with, “Mr Simons, we have identified a new market segment your existing communications strategy is not reaching.”
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Maybe it is emblematic of decadent, exhibitionist, maxi- narcissism? End stage virtue signaling.
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Let’s put this into perspective. The Golden Gate Bridge was built starting on 1933-01-05 and opening on 1937-05-27 for a total cost of US$ 35 million at the time, which is around US$ 530 million in 2020 “dollars”. This was US$ 1.3 million (then, US$ 25.7 million in 2020) under budget.
According to the Yahoo article, work on the “suicide net” project was authorised by “bridge officials” in 2008, and after construction finally began in 2018, it is now estimated to be completed in December 2023 at a cost of “at least US$ 398 million”. This does not include re-configuring maintenance platforms used to work on the nether regions of the bridge, which is estimated to take until January, 2026.
- Build the bridge: 4 years, US$ 530 million
- Put up a net to catch people from jumping off it: 15 years, US$ 398 million
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California’s Department of Justice mistakenly posted the names, addresses and birthdays of nearly 200,000 gun owners on the internet because officials didn’t follow policies or understand how to operate their website, according to an investigation released Wednesday.
In the U.S., farm output has grown 170% in the postwar era, despite total inputs — capital, land, labor, and energy — only growing by 7% over the same period. In just the last 50 years, yields for the three major American crops — corn, wheat, and soy — have increased 200%, 100%, and 37%, respectively.
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One of the "1984"s in that chart should be a “Brave New World” or possibly a “We”.
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Oxford has said it will “decolonise” computing degree courses because of alleged slavery links to machine learning.
The university’s computer science department has overhauled modules to show students “how global histories of domination and subjugation have impacted the structures of science they see and the assumptions they encounter”.
It says it is committed to “understanding what it means to decolonise the curriculum and examining preconceptions that have been taken for granted for decades, if not centuries”.
The faculty, one of the oldest computer sciences hubs in the UK, says there is “growing awareness” that “new technologies can have a detrimental effect on individuals, communities and entire societies”.
But the department, headed by Prof Leslie Ann Goldberg, has come under fire for becoming “colonised” itself by US radical critical race theories.
“We need to go beyond understanding these effects to realise that they are often rooted in a colonial past that even at its most benign, sought to impose Western standards and understandings on other countries, and at its worst enslaved and reduced local populations, creating divisions and hierarchies of value that are replicated in the vast datasets so often used in machine learning,” faculty chiefs said.
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Toby Young, head of the Free Speech Union, told The Telegraph: “With the capture of the Oxford computer science department, the colonisation of Britain’s universities by America’s grievance industrial complex is complete.
“Henceforth, it doesn’t matter what subject you choose to study at university whether it’s English or computer science – you will be taught about critical race theory.”
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Would woke future generations be able to continue to operate the complex machinery behind our current very pleasant lifestyle? Was the now famous “Idiocracy” documentary prescient and not just very accurate?
Decolonializing sanitation departments is when we might begin to notice some minor problems flushing and not getting cholera after drinking tap water…
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It was an understatement. People would have forgotten how to make Brawndo long before they were stupid enough to use it for irrigation. They showed a semi-functional society with a mean IQ probably in the low-mid 80s. Society would have collapsed somewhere in the mid 90s
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Those kinds of IQ’s are what bus companies seek in their drivers - able to do numbingly boring work day after day.
But all this was supposedly thought up by “smart people”. ?What happened to them. ?Did their brains turn to goo and flow into their shoes.
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To see these toilets financed by Gates, we went to Switzerland, to a kind of Harvard for pee…
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Cheaper than building a ramp and continuing to pay for her retirement…
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The official job title is “director of rodent mitigation,” although it was promptly dubbed the rat czar. Salary range is $120,000 to $170,000.
“The ideal candidate is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter,” reads that ad.
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