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Auckland Council is facing some significant financial challenges, requiring some tough choices. We [It, the council] need[s] to overcome a forecast budget shortfall that has grown to $295 million for the 2023/2024 financial year. — from the Budget Summary [here] [for the truth of this, see below, A Better

Vernor Vinge, 30 years ago, wrote, The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era I'm reading it now. the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection For Vinge, human intelligence acts as its own simulator, displacing that of the world

Gramsci’s famous motto, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” was taken from Romain Rolland who had taken it from Jacob Burckhardt’s description of the Greeks –which Nietzsche read to his friends at Sorrento in 1876. as perhaps a note on this post

the title of this post is from John Ash’s poem, “Second Prose for Roy Fisher,” page 54 in the volume, The Branching Stairs, published by Carcanet, Manchester, UK, although, England, might be more appropriate, in 1984, and refers to a “missile thrown without anger: speculatively, to see what would

While paranoia in everyday life asks questions it believes have terrifying answers, paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. For paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art. — Jonathan Lethem, Fear

Donald E. Westlake asks in his introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now… Well he starts out by saying “I knew Willeford some,” and knowing Willeford some he found him to be secure in his persona and to have attained a calm plateau that his character Hoke