18 quotes
Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.
Rule 34 (2011)
No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.
Rule 34 (2011)
Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.
Rule 34 (2011)
Ninety-five percent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties.
Rule 34 (2011)
Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.
Rule 34 (2011)
Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.
Rule 34 (2011)
Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.
Rule 34 (2011)
I think we may be mistaking the elephant’s tail for a bell-pull.
Rule 34 (2011)
Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.
Rule 34 (2011)
“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”
Rule 34 (2011)
You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.
Rule 34 (2011)
Truly the jaws of irony are agape!
Rule 34 (2011)
You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.
Rule 34 (2011)
Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.
Rule 34 (2011)
But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.
Rule 34 (2011)
You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
Rule 34 (2011)
Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal.
Rule 34 (2011)
It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.
Rule 34 (2011)