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  "title": "Rule 34",
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      "slug": "little-white-lies",
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      "text": "Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.",
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      "slug": "but-policing-crime",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "text": "“The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’”",
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      "text": "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.",
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      "slug": "human-consciousness-isnt",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/charles-stross/rule-34/human-consciousness-isnt",
      "text": "Human consciousness isn’t optimized for anything, except maybe helping feral hominids survive in the wild.",
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      "text": "Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it.",
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      "text": "You’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief.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.",
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      "text": "No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent.",
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      "text": "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.",
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