"<$ave0RDi3>: they're claiming the unemployment rate's 60.4%
<$ave0RDi3>: real data's at 67.8
<C3r3al_K|llr>: shit
<flutterbye>: wow
<Anonymous User 13>: they cook the books?
<$ave0RDi3>: have done for years <$ave0RDi3>: keeping the rate below 62 or something is supposed to be good for reelection"

Ouch and also nice worldbuilding here with the absurdly high number!

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"You know, they gave me a file to read about you before I came out.” "Anything interesting?" Satya asked. "I dunno. Outed you in the first two sentences, so I just stopped reading. Nobody who cares that much about someone being queer has anything useful to say about them"

True 👍🏻

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"It's not a design," Satya said. "It's calligraphy." She paused for a bit, then continued, "It says 'a love of cats is an aspect of faith.' More or less. It’s hadith. It's better in Arabic."

💙

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Interesting focus on *materials*: there's the nanotech, of course, like Gibson's or Stephenson's, building all kinds of things from pure carbon and other raw materials. There's the body, stripped to component materials. But there are also a lot of wooden things: desks, chairs.

Is having wooden stuff, not made by a maker but naturally grown, a status marker?

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"These are our most precious secrets, and they exist nowhere in any digital format. Part of my job, in point of fact, is to protect them." "I don't get it," Satya said. Dan shook her head a bit in amazement. "It's the oldest form of security there is," Dan said. "Quantum computing makes digital security unreliable at best"

Hah. I love it.

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"The relative warmth inside was welcome, even if it was still only fifty degrees or so."

Argh it's always the same!

Me: *reads "only fifty degrees"*

Me: 🤔 "only"?!

Me: 💡ah yes. Fahrenheit. 🙄

Me: *does conversion*

Me: okay, ten degrees Celsius, yeah, not that warm

(Apparently, even though this isn't the US but a united North America, the non-SI units persist)

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"Everyone forgets that what one person wants is basically the same as what everyone else wants. Comfort, warmth, food, and a little privacy. You think of lawless places and imagine blasted-out hellholes. People are people."

Something to remember, heading into apocalyptic times.

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"The chaotic, shifting light from the neon signs made it hard to even identify the gender of each, to say nothing of their ethnicities or facial features."

That might be because only one of these things can be identified by visual inspection, eh.

#Nameless #Books2026