Cyber & Cold Tales, by Virgilio Piñera

Epilogue

At noon and at the sunlit Antipodean Barracks I could reflect with Gina on those secret mysteries of tautologies and exile lives ...
--

The city slowly wakes

Her Port Botany creaks the iron containers

Her air Curfew broken before Nude Zoolland's bell strikes six o'clock 
Her crazy traffic drives its residence to the grave - yet few 
Ever so few men and women will ever enjoy the views from Matraville or Waverley cemeteries
Amen

Why Working Classes Don’t Go To Theatre

At my Night School I once met  a  Mittleuropean sinner 
she whispered that Sydney was more often about what doesn’t happen here
Gently, crown employee, waiter. Friend, confessor ... Even Bob regrets some mortality in MMXVIII
Yet who needs theatre when some workplaces have bad one or more elitist drama kings and queens 

The Man Building Robots That Look (And Increasingly Act) Human

Tim Berners-Lee Invented The Internet. It Went Wrong. Now He Has A Plan To Fix It

MACRO: GOOD LATITUDIONAL ADVICE. Israel To US: Don’t Sell F-35s To Turkey. “Until the roll-out ceremony of the first Turkish F-35 last week, many in the Israeli defense establishment were sure that Washington would stop the sale. Now that it’s unclear if the US will act, official Israeli sources are speaking out: ‘Turkey is a member of NATO on paper only, and now cooperates with countries that are against the U.S., not only in words. This delivery is something that Israel cannot understand’.”

How One Of Italy’s Best Restaurants Keeps Its Creative Edge Sharp

MICRO: THE MORE GYNOCENTRIC OUR SOCIETY BECOMES, THE MORE UNHAPPY WOMEN AND GIRLS SEEM TO BE: How Many Teenage Girls Deliberately Harm Themselves? Nearly 1 in 4, Survey Finds.

Dashiell C. Shapiro (Wood LLP, San Francisco), Cryptocurrency and the Shifting IRS Enforcement Model, 1 Stan. Blockchain L. & Pol'y ___ (2018):

This Article reviews the IRS’s previous enforcement models, and considers how these have shifted in recent decades. The IRS has increasingly moved away from a purely punitive system towards one that focuses on customer service, the theory being that a procedurally fair system will increase taxpayer satisfaction and voluntary compliance. Given the IRS’s steady shift to a more holistic tax enforcement approach, the Author believes that the IRS is likely to take a broad-based approach to cryptocurrency tax enforcement.

Scourge of lobbyists to continue in a change of government

It looks if the scourge of lobbyists will continue in Canberra if Bill Shorten wins the next election. As with the Coalition, there is no sign the ALP is prepared to curb the way lobbyists are corrupting public policy in Australia

Eight cups of coffee could extend your life, new study suggests - but watch the sugar

The results don't prove your coffee pot is a fountain of youth.

Politician Bob Carr has said he could've been kinder as NSW Premier | News Local - Daily  Terror 

Are words actually any use to describe what pain (or passion, for that matter) really feels like? Words only come when everything is over, when things have calmed down. They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful

Australian government, IBM mint $1 billion advanced technologies deal
A new $1b deal struck by the DTA secures a suite of high-tech services for 900 federal government agencies, including three regional hubs for blockchain, AI and quantum computing.
 

Marketing Firm Exactis Leaked a Personal Info Database with 340 Million Records Wired

 Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Use Design to Trick You Into Handing Over Your Data, New Report Warns Gizmodo

Facebook’s Latest Problem: It Can’t Track Where Much of the Data Went Wall Street Journal

Facebook Patent Imagines Triggering Your Phone’s Mic When a Hidden Signal Plays on TV Gizmodo. Man, am I glad I don’t watch TV.

The one thing I want to repeat for the tenth, for the hundredth time is that all this is true, that it was thus and not otherwise:

This hell exists today alone. There is no past and no future; everyone knows that in his heart. The past is dead; the future is death. Between the two lies the narrow watershed, life. And that life consists of pursuing a shoelace, of quarreling over a seat by the stove, of fleeting encounters with a woman on the barter system, of intolerable loneliness in intolerable crowds. Each week it rises anew to the fiercest, the unspeakably grisly horror of the one night, the night before the departure; the apocalyptic plunge, forever new, of hundreds of human beings into destruction and death.

Some of Piñera’s stories are a mere paragraph long. Here, for example, is “Insomnia” in its entirety:

The man goes to bed early. He can’t fall asleep. He tosses and turns in bed, as might be expected. He gets tangled in the sheets. He lights a cigarette. He reads a little. He turns out the light again. But he can’t sleep. At three o’clock, he gets out of bed. He wakes his friend next door and confides that he can’t sleep. He asks the friend for advice. The friend advises him to take a short walk to tire himself out. And then, right away, to drink a cup of linden blossom tea and turn out the light. He does all that, but is unable to fall asleep. He gets up again. This time he goes to see a doctor. As usual, the doctor talks a lot but the man still doesn’t fall asleep. At six in the morning, he loads a revolver and blows his brains out. The man is dead, but hasn’t been able to get to sleep. Insomnia is a very persistent thing.

Cold Tales, by Virgilio Piñera (1988)