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Somewhere around 4 years ago, I had a coworker named Vic.

At first blush, Vic was a charming man. He was a Brit and was originally hired on as a temp worker to pick up a few tickets while the rest of the team was busy with a major project. Vic seemed to have a good attitude (IMO probably the biggest thing with a new hire), and was eager to learn.

We ended up hiring Vic full time and as the project was winding down I started spending time on him trying to get him trained up and more useful. I quickly realized that training this guy was going to be a goddamn expedition. I had to train him on switching directories in a command window. I was literally starting from zero with him.

I would spend hours sitting beside him teaching him super basic stuff that many non-IT users probably know. After quite a few sessions, it became clear to me that this guy had some sort of learning disability. He was practically untrainable. I would try train him on something and he would take notes on whatever we were doing, but the next day we would be back at square one.

At one point I had assigned him a simple task that should have taken an hour or two to complete. I gave him two weeks to do it. Every day I would ask how is XX coming along? "Oh, good", he would say followed by some frantic clicking. I would tell him if he has any questions, I'm right here.

Finally the two weeks were up and I asked for the completed whatever it was. He had nothing. He had literally nothing to show. I lost it on him. "What the hell have you been doing for the last two weeks? You had literally one thing to do that should have taken a couple hours and you have nothing. I was right there and you asked nothing. What the hell, man?"

That was the last straw for me. This guy was fucking useless. Worse than useless. He would actively fuck stuff up and I would have to fix it. I told management that he was garbage and needed to go and a couple months later he was gone.

That should be the end of the story, but unfortunately that is just the beginning. After being let go, he contacted the team to see if anyone would be willing to give him a reference. The 3 of us politely told him that no, we didn't feel comfortable providing a reference. For a couple months, he would call us every few weeks asking for us to give us a reference we would always refuse. He decided to use one of my coworkers as a reference anyways, which was a little awkward when they called her. She had to politely refuse.

We went a couple years without hearing or thinking about him, until about a month ago when he emails my coworker asking why she won't give him a reference. He also sends her a message on Facebook asking the same. My coworker goes to our manager and HR about this, and together they draft up a reply basically saying I don't feel comfortable providing a reference and furhter inquiries can be made directly to HR.

Well he didn't like that. Since then he has been sending increasingly crazy emails. Here is the most recent:

Mr [corporate legal counsel],

Good Morning.

Finally, I got your attention.

Listen, do not tell me what you are going to do.

ACTION speaks louder than 'empty' words.

Go ahead and take your steps.

Let's head over Queens Bench, we will escalate this matter.

Don't forget now, file for harassment and to top it off, get a restraining order.

Keep smiling and have and good day.

Good Luck :)

[crazy Vic],

What a nutbar... This guy seems to think he is entitled to a good reference. He was not good with computers. He sucked at learning. He was/is not IT material. I don't see what his end game is. Does he expect that after enough harassment we'll all of a sudden be all like "Oh, sorry, yea you actually are a good worker; I'd love to give a reference..."

Fucking guy...

Some people were discussing time travel earlier and if that were possible, whether the traveler would create a new timeline, effectively a parallel universe, by their actions, or whether they would alter their existing universe with what some people consider may be paradoxical results.

One idea that occurred to me would be that a time traveler could go into the past and pick up Albert Einstein. After that they could travel back to a time, say, an hour earlier in Albert Einstein's life, before their previous arrival, and pick him up again. This could be repeated many, many times until they could open an academy full of Albert Einsteins to collaborate on all the big problems in science. Has anyone written a sci fi story about this idea? If not, they should!¹

Depending on how the causality works, it might not be a good idea for them to drop each Albert off at the academy one by one before returning to earlier and earlier moments in his past--because with each new pick-up the slightly older Alberts that were taken to the academy might cease to exist. If so, maybe it would be safer to keep all the Alberts on board the craft until the mission is complete. This might be sufficient to keep them all in the same timeline as the time traveler.

If this thought experiment is coherent then weirdly it points to a source of almost infinite energy. Just pump an oil well dry, then travel back to just enough time before the pumping began to empty it again, repeating this over and over throughout the entire history of the oil well. Weird or what?

^{1. mcgrew, I'm looking at you.}

There is a word, "accelerationist," to describe the mindset of people like yesterday's Christchurch terrorist. You see, he didn't do this just for its own sake; he's trying for nothing less than to provoke the collapse of civilization via race war and internal strife, presumably to rebuild it as some sort of whites-only paradise. He in effect believes that he has to destroy it to save it (and that worked out SO well everywhere else that idea was tried...). I believe his scope is global, and he's trying to encourage copycat attacks worldwide with this.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't be too worried about one single psychopath trying to start a race war, and even saw him explicitly compared to Charles Manson and his "Helter-Skelter" plan in the main forum thread. Ordinarily, I'd agree and let it go as another sad but inevitable tragedy. Ordinarily, though, we wouldn't have an Anglosphere that's spent at least the last 20 years soaking in hatred and the last 2 and a half gleefully parading around its worst tendencies and members with all but official sanction from the leader of the supposed Free World.

"Accelerant" is also something that worsens and fuels fires, and there's a good reason for that. What we have now is the social equivalent of a pine barrens forest with decades of leaf litter, just waiting for that one spark. I did my junior year research on precisely this phenomenon, back in college. When the litter builds up, the entire forest goes up in flames at the slightest provocation. So I would say another term for people like this is "socilogical arsonist."

Unfortunately, I also believe his kind has won the day. I felt the US go over the edge about 12-18 months ago; civil war is at this point a matter of when, not if, and unlike the last one, today we have powerful enemies who are just waiting for the right time to swoop in and rip the country apart to loot it for their own ends. Which, to be fair, is probably what the country deserves at the national level, but will suck massively for individuals, most of whom are innocent. You know, just like when the US did it to other countries. Regardless, unless something incredibly huge and positive happens, I believe we're long past the point of no return.

Now, as to the other two terms in the title: you may be familiar with Roko's Basilisk already. I am referring to something more general than that: my definition of basilisk in this sense is "a pernicious meme or memeplex that does permanent damage to the mind in, at the very least, ways related to itself, specifically regarding removing itself or blunting its influence." Like the stare of the mythological basilisk, it slips in through the eyeholes and flays the mind from the inside out. You can think of them as a kind of memetic advanced persistent thread-type malware.

Basilisks have several things in common. They are "sticky" in memetic terms (that is, they leave a lasting impression). They are self-sealing, meaning they reinforce themselves, often recursively and through a variety of mechanisms, including hijacking other memes. Sometimes they work in pairs or larger groups, reinforcing one another. While they need not be readily infectious, they often are. And, like the stare of the real thing, they are often fatal if left untreated.

One key component of a good basilisk is that it takes advantage of the human tendency to be lazy thinkers. That is, once within its gravitational field, people will prefer to stay in it rather than change what at that point has become a large and important part of their thinking. Thus a good basilisk has an ad-hoc answer to pretty much every objection that might be raised to it as a sort of anti-malware-evasion routine.

Calvinism is an excellent example: it centers on the idea of TULIP, this being "total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, persistence of saints/saved." Basically, this undercuts critical thinking by making it an issue completely out of one's control; one is either saved or not, through God's action and not one's own, no one can do anything to become elect or reprobate, and (here's the stinger): "if you're really saved, you wouldn't be doubting in the first place, now would you?" The "stickiness" is of course the threat of eternal torture, which is probably the single "stickiest" meme it is by definition possible to create. So what we have here is a persistent, all-encompassing black hole of a memeplex.

Much white supremacist thought, or supremacist thought in general, works the same way. The hook, the "stickiness," is something along the lines of "your life sucks unfairly, and it's not only not your fault, it's the fault of $ETHNIC_GROUP." That is *very* powerful to anyone who's suffered unfairly. Plant this one, and entire categories of critical thought get cut off at the roots, not least because when people are suffering and tired and angry and traumatized, they very literally do not have the energy to do more than the laziest thinking.

Finally, the exploitation of these patterns is what I am referring to as "dark psychohistory," which is a direct nod to Asimov. People who understand this can have effects completely out of proportion to the amount of direct force they are capable of bringing to bear. "Stochastic terrorism" is another way of talking about this, and it's something Trump is doing: while we're going to get bootlicking psychopathic apologists like Hallow pointing out that Trump himself never directly incites people to violence, he says things that make it likely-to-certain that among a large enough group of people with a certain mindset, *one or more of them* will do something violent.

If hiring a hitman is one degree of separation, stochastic terrorism is two or three. We can't, in this case, draw a direct line as we could from the hitman and the person hiring him. But it's fairly obvious that things like "I'll pay their legal bills" are just a degree or two of separation further removed; we have a name for this, which is "incitement to violence."

And that is one tool in the accelerationist toolbox. Our friend in Christchurch sees himself as a sort of revolutionary vanguard trooper; he is hoping that the very fact that he was able to pull this off, combined with the force multiplier of global news broadcasts, will be enough to spark off more attacks of a similar kind, which themselves will generate more, and so forth. It's rather like a runaway nuclear fission reaction in that sense.

So what do we do about this? Unfortunately, little to nothing: i have concluded that most humans simply are not capable of the type of introspection and critical thought necessary to ward this sort of memetic plague off, many of them because they are suffering too much and too concerned with simple survival to have the energy to invest in that sort of mental hygiene. I do, sadly, believe that civil war is not only inevitable but not so very far away. My one solace is that these "accelerationists" are going to get exactly what's coming to them, here and hereafter; the world they create will be one in which the living envy the dead.

If you all wonder why I keep saying death holds no fear for me, this is why.

I like to take a moment to thank all the people that work hard to keep this site up and running.

For many of us, this website is like a second home. There are a lot of people that work hard to keep this site up and running with new content for us to talk about. These people are not being paid, yet do fantastic work.

I'd like to thank The Mighty Buzzard for a lot of the stuff he (presumably ;) ) does behind the scenes that none of us ever hear about or see. The editors do fantastic work by editing stories so they look consistant. This takes a lot of time. These people donate significant amounts of time for us. Take a moment and thank them:

martyb
janrinok
CoolHand
takyon
NotSanguine
charon
Fnord666
chromas
mrpg
FatPhil
cmn32480

I'm sorry if I forgot anyone! It wasn't intentional and I appreaciate whatever you do too!

Well the good news is that most congresscritters do, and Trump's fake-ass emergency was rejected.

41 Republican Senators and 182 Republican House Representatives, on the other hand, just proved how completely full of crap they are.

A man is on his way home from work. Traffic comes to a complete halt.

"Wow this traffic is worse than usual. Nothing is moving."

Soon he observes a police officer moving back and forth among cars getting closer and closer.
He rolls down his window and asks "Officer, what's the delay?"
The officer replies...

"Trump is so depressed about not always getting his way, that he stopped his limo in the middle of traffic and is now threatening to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. He says everyone hates him. He can't just quit because the Fake News would laugh at him. And he doesn't have, and never has had, enough money for REAL lawyers to defend himself from all the criminal prosecutions that would follow."

"So I've been taking up a collection.", the officer says.

"Oh, really, how much have you collected so far?"

"So far about 26 gallons, but many folks are still siphoning."

_{adapted from a "Canadian prime minister" joke}

I was considering the opposition to Federal taxation and wondered what might happen if the requirements to pay Federal taxes were optional on a state-by-state basis.

The way this would work is that state legislatures could opt the residents and businesses of their state out of paying any Federal taxes, levies and fees.

In order to make this reasonably fair, if a state were to opt out, all those in the state would no longer receive any Federal monies, including highway funds, Medicaid block grants, Superfund grants, education funds, federal government contracts (including subcontracts), Medicare, Social Security, military bases, or any other appropriations from the Federal government.

There are a couple of ways this could go. Those states who are least dependent on federal funds might opt out.

Alternatively, states with populations that are most anti-Federal taxes might opt out.

What other scenarios might drive a state to opt out?

More details:
FY 2013 Federal taxation and spending by state
Federal Tax Revenue By State

Would you support such a law? If so (or not), why (or why not)?

Sometimes you randomly things of events from the past. This morning I was thinking about a girl I met at the wave pool when I was about 13-14. It's a slow day at work, so I'm sharing the story.

I was at the Wave Pool with my Dad and siblings. It was a pretty awesome wave pool with a water slide, hot tub, and rope swing to jump into the pool with. I've always been a skinny person, but at that age, I looked like one of those malnourished kids from Schindler's List. Bony, lanky, awkward. I was on the deck of the pool waiting in the little line to use the rope swing, and some girl comes up to me and says "My friend likes you" and points to some girl.

My preteen brain is like "OMG!! IT"S HAPPENING!! I'M GOING TO GET THE SEX!". Her friend and I walk over to her, and we end up in the Hot Tub holding hands. I assume we make awkward conversation for a while, but before too long, it was time to go. We both left at the same time.

I waited for her in the exit area of the pool. When she came out, I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me. I felt really good and headed out to my dad's car. About 1/2 way home I realized that I didn't know her name. How was I supposed to call her without her name? "Uhh... Is there a girl around 14 that lives in this household?" I thought really hard about how I could call her, but couldn't come up with anything that wouldn't be super awkward (and let's face it, just calling a girl in itself was super scary). Needless to say, I never called her.

Sometimes I still think about her. Did she wait for my call that never came? Did she realize that we didn't know each other's names and that was a likely the reason I never called?

And that's the end of the story. That was the first time I held a girl's hand. It was a big milestone for me, and I never even knew her name.

Some say she's still waiting by the phone to this day...

The U.S. trade deficit surged to a 10-year high in 2018, with the politically sensitive shortfall with China hitting a record peak, despite the Trump administration slapping tariffs on a range of imported goods in an effort to shrink the gap.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday that an 18.8 percent jump in the trade deficit in December had contributed to the $621.0 billion shortfall last year. The 2018 deficit was the largest since 2008 and followed a $552.3 billion gap in 2017.

It's a rather idiotic metric to set in the first place. But, if you can't even excel at the metrics you set for yourself then you are failing.

Despite Trump's Promises, The Trade Deficit Is Only Getting Wider
U.S. trade deficit jumps to 10-year high in 2018
In a Blow to Trump, America’s Trade Deficit Hit Record $891 Billion