Now, it was obviously reasonably for the ministry of health to acquire some face masks even at inflated prices common for medical equipment -- at least for people working in hospitals, but he overestimated the amount required by orders of magnitude. Per WP, he bought 5.8 billion masks for an average price of about an Euro per mask. That is 70 masks per person in Germany, most of which were later destroyed when they expired.
To be fair, as far as I know this may have even been on the lower end of necessity. FFP2 and N95 masks were always supposed to be one-use, for maybe 4 to 8 hours of continuous usage, the filter stops being functional as it gets dirty. After that, the mask becomes just a dirty rag without any filtration functionality, as well as a health risk with bacteria and mold making breathing through them hazardous. Of course the reality had nothing to do with medical advice, people used the same mask for months often having it somewhere in a car or dirty jacket pocket to use while shopping or whatnot. All in all, it probably caused more damage than good.
georgioz
5d ago
For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral?
Forget Wolfenstein 3D, you have to play Alex Jones: NWO Wars.
People still use bedlam as idiom for craziness even in USA, it actually comes from the name of mental asylum outside of London. Sending to Coventry to me seems much more horrific than simple ghosting.
Maybe. And maybe aggressively punching the clock served as therapeutic way to express your hatred towards your employer, scars from bruised knuckles were badge of honor proudly displayed in front of your colleagues in factory canteen. Kids these days do not even know how to properly hate their job anymore, they just quit quietly like rats they are.
Again, this is nothing new. There actually was something called software crisis of 1960s. Shitty programmers made costly errors, delivered faulty code with years long delay, causing immense damage in terms of wasted time of expensive mainframes. It was direct effect of the early thinking that software is a work for "calculators", akin to clerical and administrative jobs. All the really talented people focused on hardware. If you have a software company that thinks software is a job for low paid foreign labor, the results will be the same.
I actually think this is only half truth. The issue here is with the welfare state and rise of taxation. The tax as percent of GDP was remarkably low in 19th century: between 1-3% of GDP. This changed after WW1 and The New Deal rising to 15% and 20% GDP, peaking at 30% by 1960s.
This is however artificial incentive. For instance today the average cost of elementary school student in USA is $17k a year. Imagine if family with three children can decide: wife stays at home, maybe creates a pod with other mothers and manages schooling and the government gives them $51k tax credit a year and they spend it as they want. Maybe children have to pass a test on par with at least with second lowest decile results compared to local public school. On top of that the wife can cook, she can take care of household chores and to other management such as driving and so forth. Also she could easily sell her surplus of cakes or jams on market or outside of house without constant government meddling with endless regulation. Her net contribution toward household could easily approach $100k a year.
This is the tragedy of the current situation. Women still take care of children, do the laundry, they do bring beer and sandwich to men, they still take care of elderly and sick as they used to do it in the past - in capacity such as teachers, maids, waitresses, cooks and nurses. Only they do it for strangers and not for their own family, losing value in the process. It is all just and illusion and scam.
Like others said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing, with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.
Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.
By the way this is something that happened in IT since the beginning. Programming evolved from hardware level binary programming to assembler programming to structured programming to object oriented programming to todays Agentic AI programming. The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries to todays agentic AI which just moves it one step further.
I think it is inevitable, there will be some niche space for old school thinking, but it will resolve itself in time. For instance knowing some basic coding in Assembly from university is a good exercise and knowledge, but you will probably never use it outside of specific niches such as cybersecurity or firmware coding. Future good programmer will probably look quite differently from you now, but your skills would also be considered useless for programming Apollo 11 guidance system in 1969.
Agreed, Epstein was also involved in financial laundering and weapon smuggling with dealers such as Douglas Leese and Adnan Khashoggi. Human trafficking was only one of the arms of the whole criminal enterprise.
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