“Social Credit” begins to bear fruit

 Forward!, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 232018
 

Coming soon to the mind of an authoritarian with dreams of domination near you, the Chinese “Sesame Credit” system:

China blacklists millions of people from booking flights as ‘social credit’ system introduced

as of May this year, the government had blocked 11.14 million people from flights and 4.25 million from taking high-speed train trips … 3 million people are barred from getting business class train tickets … slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets

It should be interesting to see what this results in. it seems that even though the system isn’t yet fully rolled out – won’t be until 2020 – a dozen million people are already being ruined by it. When humans are systematically oppressed, most will just sorta roll over an take it and/or try to survive within the system, up to and including groveling and changing whatever it is that is causing them trouble; some small percent will try to *look* like they’re getting along while working quietly to undermine the oppressors; and some will pick up a rock, a gun or a bomb and launch into all-out revolution.

A dozen million people is, on one hand, a tiny fraction of Chinas 1.3 billion. But on the other hand, that is still  whole lot of people… and in a very short time. It may be that china is going about this too far, too fast. They put a clamp down on a hundred million people, they could well be looking at three million people willing to take up arms against the government. And under the system in place, these people could really have no option but to do so. It would not surprise me if Chinese hackers are already working their way into the system. A good way to attack it would not be to try to bring it down, but to “aid” it: ruin the “social credit” of not just government officials – who are probably immune to this sort of thing anyway –  but to random millions. If you ban half the country from traveling, you’ll crush the transportation infrastructure every bit as effectively as if half the bus and train riders had decided to boycott the system… with the added bonus of millions of travelers raising a stink at the station when they are told they can’t travel. You think flying with the TSA is bad now? Imagine if there was a 50/50 chance that you would be told at the airport that you can’t go.

Such a system would be very, very difficult to enact within the US due to the Constitution. But then, so would a gun ban or speech codes, and yet here we are. We’ve seen the likes of Gab and people who espouse unpopular politics being “deplatformed” and deprived of their ability to make an income, along with a number of people whose lives and careers have been ruined because of a bad joke or a harmless, thoughtless moment of political incorrectness. “Sesame Credit” or something vaguely similar need not be a government program for it to cause substantial havoc within the US. Look, for example, at the Southern Poverty Law Center: they are the gatekeepers on who is and is not a “hate group.” You can easily have your bank decide to no longer do business with you because you end up on their list… even though the SPLC is a politically slanted organization and all you need to do to be declared a “hate group” is annoy the wrong person at the SPLC with wrongthink.

 Posted by at 11:57 am

Well, this sort of thing could turn interesting…

 Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 232018
 

Attack on Chinese consulate foiled; two policemen martyred

In short: at least one suicide bomber and at least two gunmen were stopped before they could attack the Chinese consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

Yeah… I don’t think that that sort of thing will work out so well. Commies don’t exactly pull punches when it comes to fighting terrorists. They tend to make whole populations vanish.

 Posted by at 2:26 am

Rescue *all* members of Team Humanity

 AARRRGH, aircraft, awesomeness, critters, youtube  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

On November 9, a helicopter was flying over the Woolsey fire in California when it received notification of some folks who needed rescue. After a careful landing in a rough area *real* close to the fire, they picked up a few civilians… and their dogs. And from what I saw, there was zero hesitation on the part of the chopper crew about picking up those pets, even though one was a large mastiff who was clearly dubious of the whole “get on the helicopter” idea.

Bravo, sirs. I can’t imagine ditching my critters in an evacuation. During Hurricane Katrina there were tales of people who were forced to abandoned cats and dogs because the people driving the boats wouldn’t carrying them. Now… for something like a horse… yeah, there are weight limits. But if I was being rescued from a flood or a fire, I’d happily let some strangers smelly panicky dog sit on my lap.

Parking an expensive house on top of a hill sounds great until you realize you live in fire country, the hillside is loaded with very flammable brush, it’s been a drought for years and fires go *uphill*. I wonder how many of these folks, when they rebuild, will build out of concrete and adobe with large elevated water tanks to hose down the house at the last minute.

 Posted by at 9:50 pm

Bill Nye, The No Space Colonization Guy

 Hmm..., Meh., news, science, spacecraft  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

This seems to be an incredibly short-sighted point of view for someone who buries himself in the mantle of Science. I wonder if his recent delvings into social justice have NPC-ified him?

Bill Nye says Mars colonies won’t happen: ‘Are you guys high?’

“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high? … We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet.  … Nobody’s gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians … It’s not reasonable because it’s so cold. And there is hardly any water. There’s absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there’s nothing to breathe.”

Meh. Translation: “It’s hard so nobody will want to do it.”

 Posted by at 6:14 pm

Oh, goodie. FGM is legal in the US.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, My Fiction, nukes, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

Welcome to cultural enrichment, now endorsed by the judiciary!

Charges dropped in first federal genital mutilation case in US

A Detroit judge has dropped nearly all the charges against a Michigan doctor accused of performing female genital mutilation on at least nine underage girls, according to court documents.

In a decision filed Tuesday, Judge Bernard Friedman ruled that the federal female genital mutilation law is unconstitutional and that Congress did not have the right to criminalize the practice, and therefore he dismissed six of eight charges in the United States’ first federal case involving the procedure.

Fan. Bloody. Tastic.

The article doesn’t give the whole decision, but the bits it quotes seem… lame.
 

 Posted by at 4:13 pm

Getting High with SpaceX

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

On the one hand, SpaceX has announced the date for their first planned unmanned launch of their manned Dragon spacecraft to the ISS: January 7, less than two months from now. If that works… then SpaceX will be on track to restore Americas ability to launch our own astronauts back into space. Yay! On the other hand…

Reefer Madness at NASA

In short, NASA has apparently flipped out after seeing Elon Musk,away from work, away from SpaceX property, and on his own time, smoke some weed and drink some booze. So they’re conducting safety reviews of both SpaceX and Boeing, focusing on their “workplace safety cultures.”

In that same spirit, I hope they run a similar review of themselves. I’ve heard tell that astronauts sometimes like to get tore up on their free time.

I suspect that a *lot* of this is n effort by the entrenched Old School to get into spaceX to get them to change their culture to be more Old School.

 Posted by at 3:28 pm

The Road to Biodeisel Hell

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

This is a fun and entertaining read:

Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.

In short: in the early 2000’s the government sought to combat global warming and carbon emissions. Not, say, by doing something as monumentally sensible as building a crop of new breeder reactors, but instead by focusing on biodeisel and ethanol: the turning of food into fuel. In the midwest the corn farmers loved this, as now there was a whole new market for their crops since corn could be turned into ethanol; at the same time, poor people who kinda relied on cheap corn for, you know, eating, were just SOL because the price of corn went up. But corn was not the best source of bio-fuel. That would be oil-palm trees, whose fruit produce an oil that’s just great for that sort of thing. Problem: oil palms don’t exactly grow like champs in the US. Solution: find a place where they do, like Borneo, then chop down, clear cut and burn off the existing forest to plant crops of oil palms. Result:

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe.

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So not only did this dump boatloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, it trashed the local ecosystem and has led to the usual dystopias of corruption and crackdowns. The palm-oil based fuels are now mandated by law within Indonesia.

Tell me again why we’re better off not building latest-gen nuclear power plants?

 Posted by at 12:49 pm

Whoopsie

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, cats, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., humor, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 212018
 

Last I heard, nobody seems to know where on Earth this occurred.

Clearly the shelving in the warehouse was either not well built or was hilariously overloaded. If someone wasn;t killed or seriously injured I’d be shocked.

And so long as I’m posting stuff that has already been blasted all around the interwebs for a couple days, there’s this video of the cat “Wilfred” (who really does look like that) that has been hilariously (and NSFWedly) overdubbed by Michael Rapaport.

Blink, mother…

 

 

 Posted by at 3:41 am
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