Charles Stross Quotes

A current generation smartphone is more powerful than a 1991 supercomputer.

The British ruling class was never noted for its expertise in haut cuisine. Rumors that they conquered a quarter of the planet in search of a decent meal cannot be discounted.

We need to deal with the Jews, you know," Fabian confides, then pauses dramatically.
This is new and unwelcome, and more than somewhat worrying. (I knew the PM held some rather extreme views, but this level of forthright anti-Semitism is unexpected.) "May I ask why?" I ask hesitantly.
"I'd have thought it was obvious!" He sniffs. "All that charitable work. Loaves and fishes, good Samaritans, y'know. Sermon on the Mount stuff. Can't be doing with it—"
Beside me, Chris Womack risks interrupting his flow: "Don't you mean Christians, sir?"
"—And all those suicide bombers. Blowing people up in the name of their god, but can't choke down a bacon roll. Can't be doing with them: you mark my words, they'll have to be dealt with!"
Across the room, Vikram Choudhury nearly swallows his tongue. Chris persists: "But those are Mus—"
"—All Jews!" the Prime Minister snaps. "They're just the same from where I'm standing." His expression is one of tight-lipped disapproval—then I blink, and in the time it takes before my eyelids open again, I forget his face. He sips delicately from his teacup, pinky crooked, then explains his thinking. "Christians, Muslims, Jews—they say they're different religions, but you mark my words, they all worship the same god, and you know what that leads to if you let it fester. Monotheism is nothing but trouble—unless the one true god is me, of course."

Venous blood isn’t really blue. In lipstick terms it’s dark plum, not crimson gloss.

What are the consequences when the government, the media, and the leaders of commerce all speak with one voice? Why, it means that if you hold opinions other than the ones you are told to, you are out of step, and if so, it is best to bite your tongue and be silent. The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.

Lord Acton said power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

It’s the sort of Maxwell Smart hack that used to cost the CIA black budget half a billion to develop in the ’60s but is off-the-shelf from a Chinese toy factory these days.

Mhari consults her conscience and takes another step into the twilight borderland between bending the rules and breaking them.

It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.

He’s found a teapot and milk and is brewing up, because that’s what the English do when they’ve just broken out of military prison one jump ahead of murderous assassins from an alien death god cult, then survived being shot at by a main battle tank.

I’ve finally done it, I’ve broken something that shouldn’t have been broken, and I’m really not sure who the monsters are anymore.

Well, incoming fire has right of way, as they say.

GP services (and other companies) have been lobbying Congress to privatize the US Postal Service for years now. There are any number of beneficiaries: the private parcel carrier services, the phone and cable networks and internet service providers, and the obvious corporate interests who can do without the nonprofit competition. And there are any number of politicians who can make political hay by being seen to cut government spending on a basic infrastructure service that doesn’t turn a profit and that isn’t able to defend itself politically. Nothing has officially happened yet – the inertia of the US government is astonishing – but it’s obvious that the fix is in: too many people want the post office to die.

Listen, there’s nothing corrupt about it. At least there’s nothing provably corrupt about the way outsourcing contracts are handled. That’s because corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?
All of this happens very discreetly. Air gaps, Chinese walls, and plausible deniability are baked into the process. But the general pattern is out in the open for those with eyes to see.
First, identify a department with an essential function or significant capital assets on the books. Second, define ambitious performance targets they can’t possibly meet with the resources available, hire a bunch of nonexec directors to “provide valuable insights from the private sector” to the board, and in case that’s not enough, cut the budget until they fail to perform. Third, the minister moves on and a new minister parachutes in, with lots of heroic rhetoric about radical change and accountability. Fourth, the nonexec directors leave, returning to their private sector posts with the large outsourcing company they originally came from, taking with them everything they’ve learned about how the agency is run. Fifthly and finally, the work is put out to public tender, and the usual outsourcing contractors, who now know how the agency works in intimate detail, make a – surprise! – winning bid. Finally, the usual suspects show up on the golf course a year or two later and buy trebles all around.
What greases the wheels is that the capital assets managed by the agency are transferred to the new owners, thus taking them off the government’s books, thereby thinning the property portfolio the Crown can borrow against. It looks good to get all that debt off the balance sheet. Meanwhile, tax revenue continues to roll in and some of it is now siphoned off to rent back the former government assets.
You might think, “That’s insanely inefficient!” and you would be right. But you’re not seeing it through the wonderful rose-tinted lenses of high finance. Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn.

I hate guns. I can use them, but I don’t like being around them; they add this terrible random-act-of-no-god-at-all angle to any fight. Bang, you’re dead, even if you weren’t the person the shooter was aiming for, even if it’s an accidental discharge.