snakeyjake

The number of people who have lost all of their money and then killed themselves using Google and Facebook is not zero.

It's a fuckton lower than the number of people who have lost all of their money and then killed themselves due to betting.

The morality line for me is at an unknown and unknowable (and you'll just have to deal with that I am a human not a computer) position that is higher than Google/Facebook and lower than gambling apps.

edit: lol no never mind, on further self-examination I would rather starve to death under a bridge than work at facebook trying to figure out how to use AI to addict people so that they buy dropshipped garbage from our advertisers and not the other guys.

At least someone realizes the soulless unimaginative mediocrity machine makes people sound soulless, unimaginative, and mediocre.

>You're telling me that food has become so addictive

There are labs full of people whose job it is to specifically make food addictive.

More scientists and engineers have worked on the contents of a bag of Doritos than the Falcon 9.

I was there, at the dawn. I remember spigots giving out whole-ass bitcoins.

The "we're going to change the world" folks either became, or were pushed out by the, Gordon Gekko cosplayers approximately 227 milliseconds after the bitcoin whitepaper was published.

As far as I can tell, a larger value in goods and services, real non-crypto-related tangible things and actions, are purchased in Chuck-e-cheese tokens than crypto.

Crypto is tulip bulbs for the IT Crowd. It's hyper-tax-evading-money-laundering on steroids. It is everything about "duh banksters" the liars promoting crypto claimed to be against times ten trillion.

Crypto is like some very smart people took every negative aspect of the socio-economic system we find ourselves trapped within and amplified them because they realized the grift to be had, then they wrapped it all in a thin veneer of freedom and rebellion.

There is no freedom there.

>Regulated like pressure regulator

I've read every single word that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin ever wrote that survived to be collected into the various volumes of their collected writings.

Regulated has always meant "controlled".

The pressure regulator schtick sounds like some BS the NRA came up with after snorting some coke through the pile of rubles Putin gave them to poison the minds of Americans.

Here's the full text of the Federalist Papers: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1404/1404-h/1404-h.htm

"regulated" appears 26 times, often in a military context, and it always means what everyone thinks it means and is never used the way you propose.

>Elections in Ireland, till of late, were regulated entirely by the discretion of the crown, and were seldom repeated, except on the accession of a new prince, or some other contingent event.

Do you have any historical examples that support your usage of the word?

>Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though?

You expect there to be no murders.

I expect murders to be low, and for murderers to be punished.

I also expect the number of murderers in the police force to be only slightly better than that of the rest of society. There are background checks, but there are also other factors that may increase the rate, regardless: I expect from them what I expect from everyone.

So-- 7,000 murders per year.

For Iceland that's high. I think they had 3 last year.

For the United States, that's fucking fantastic! I wish we had 7,000 murders per year! If we had 3 that would be awesome but I'm not delusional.

It's all about the wider context.

Especially in this case, 6,800 of the misuses were from the LA sheriff's department doing background checks for gun permits so that's almost certainly a policy and procedure problem that has been fixed.

So that leaves around 200 cases.

Is that good? No.

But how bad is it? 200 misuses out of ten quadrillion accesses is pretty not bad, if you ask me. edit: and that's a sign that things are going well because I am not dumb enough to expect 0 misuses of anything by any group of individuals. I expect misuses to be low and for misuse to be punished.

7,000 times out of how many accesses?

7,636?

10 quadrillion?

Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?

The fact that you want to know what I think it says about you says a lot about you.

When large sums of money are involved the techbros will burn everything down, go scorched earth no matter what the consequences, to keep what they believe they're entitled to.

Masks, gloves, and frequent hand washing with soap and warm water have been proven to work for both COVID and other viral diseases and this has been settled science for a long, long, time.

Of course your definition of "proven to work" may mean "works 100% of the time with no exceptions" and that is an impossible bar to meet.

My, and many others', definition of "proven to work" is "reduces the rate of spread to the point that pandemics are impossible once an outbreak has been detected".

I've been a volunteer EMT for over 20 years and have interacted with many patients. In the mid-2000s after a particularly nasty bout of gastroenteritis I became the PPE (personal protective equipment) and hygiene tyrant.

Despite handling so many COVID patients it is impossible to even begin counting them, I have never tested positive for COVID and during the height of the pandemic I was being tested weekly (I was both a critical defense worker who needed a passed test to work in person AND a public health worker).

edit: that DOES NOT mean that PPE is 100% effective, it means that PPE in plus my hyper-anal stance on hygiene PLUS good old fashioned random chance favored me.

Even today I will don a mask prior to interacting with a patient if dispatch tells me there are respiratory issues and will put one on the second I hear a cough.

Between PPE and vaccines I can count the number of times I have been sick since 2020 on zero fingers.

Where I live only pimps (fake), retirees who got one 30 years ago from their employer upon retiring(real), nightclub promoters (fake), and criminal defense attorneys who will berate an underaged rape victim on the stand until they break down and cry for the sole purpose of being a sociopathic dick while trying to get their pedophile golf buddy off (real) and Rolex flippers (real) own Rolexes (real or fake).

edit: also franchisees whose franchise sells the most shit so the franchiser buys them one as a prize (real)

To me, seeing a Rolex on someone's wrist puts them in the same category of dickhole as a lifted pickup truck with punisher decals on the rear window and truck nutzzzz hanging off the tow hitch.

>At what cost?

$14.03 per American per year.

That's another option.

Plausible, even. The range would be very limited.

But we both know what everyone thinks is happening.

So what?

And?

"they did it so we're doing it to" is childish, worse than childish: infantile.

Looking into the social media footprints of people who are most vocal about censorship in various models it appears that for a great deal of them the primary problem they have is that they are being blocked from generating images of minors from japanese cartoons being raped.

It was not common for the low-end phones of the type used by Iraqi insurgents in 2003 to be equipped with Bluetooth.

Remember the "NSA can track phones when turned off" was from 2003.

Try to remember 2003, then adjust your memories to match the reality for an impoverished Iraqi.

My guess is that because they controlled the cellular network they pushed out an OTA firmware that made it so the phones didn't actually turn off but went into one of the ARM7TDMI's low power modes where it would wake up periodically and ping a tower before going back to sleep without turning on the screen. Those modes used so little power you wouldn't notice a difference in overall battery life.

This would be trivially detectable by any party with a $10 SDR dongle in 2025.

Why should anyone think that if the NSA was brute forcing DES in 2003 they wouldn't be doing the same thing to AES256 in 2025?

It is inappropriate to assert that a capability from 2003, used against what were almost certainly Nokia x100-series GSM phones, will still work against devices in 2025.

There is a difference between not telling someone how to make Sarin/age-gating certain topics and censoring works of fiction or references to politicians and anyone who claims there is not is so full of shit they need to have their stomach pumped.

There has been a ~90% decrease since the 1960s in the cost to fly from NYC to London due, in large part, to mind-blowing technological innovations in materials, engines, and aerodynamics.

>It sounds like your employer could save a lot of costs by hiring remote workers in the countries you mentioned.

Payroll is one of the smaller slices of the expense pie when it comes to space.

It would be extremely challenging to find engineers with the experience needed for mission assurance in the numbers needed to maintain our output.

The output, in terms of serial-numbered subassemblies, of my organization (a small team in a small division of a single American company I am almost certain most of you have never even heard of) exceeded the total production of every single EU space firm combined.

It's like how semiconductor production lines in the US have to import experts from Taiwan to get them running and it takes years and years and billions in government subsidies: experience matters.

Nothing can save me if cancer comes.

Cancer is either treatable or not. You either get cured or you die, and I don't care if I die broke. If it is curable I'll pay for it. If it is incurable, I'll go broke: so what?

That being said if I lived in Europe I'd have to hope that a football star is willing to auction his shoes to fund my trip to the US for treatment and I don't want that.

>In that case, your effort to pass yourself off as the quintessential 'regular Joe' is comedy gold.

I, an individual contributor, have the same HDHP that the CEO does-- with maxxed-out HSA of course.

My employer is a multinational engineering firm.

I travel to the UK, France, and Germany multiple times per year to meet with customers and suppliers.

If you add up funding my own retirement, paying for my private health insurance, paying for my kids to go to (state) university, having to have two evil automobiles, and paying the electric bill on my palatial manor (4-bdrm rancher with garage shed and large backyard), and subtract all of those expenses from my income I >>>STILL<<< make so much more money than anyone sitting across the table from me in Europe that I might as well be Mansa Musa the Golden King of Mali and them a homeless bum starving to death under a bridge.

It is my impression that most of the people moving to the EU are "entrepreneurs" with app ideas or "digital nomads" who want to run a social media campaign from MacBook in a cafe while engineers and scientists who want to work on cool stuff and have labs with a budget big enough to buy test gear and do something keep trying to score a US visa.

It depends.

Many "intellectual" jobs build things that have never existed before and I have never seen an automation for something that has never existed before.

I have also not yet seen a model create something new that was not already contained within the dataset it was trained on. An astronaut on a horse is only superficially original and does not count as "new".

Of course, I am not omniscient so that may have already occurred but there is so much bullshittery in the "AI" (it's not I) space that any claim that it has occurred should be quarantined into the "likely a lie" zone of of one's brain until there is overwhelming evidence in the amount needed to convince an astronaut who has been in orbit and gazed upon the Earth that the planet is flat.

The potential of x-Models (x=ll, transformer, tts, etc), which are not AI, to perfect the flooding of social media with bullshit to increase the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people is so great that there is a near-infinite stream of money available to be spent on useless shit like this.

Talking to an x-Model (still not AI), just like talking to a human, has never been, is not now, and will never be faster than looking at an information-dense table of data.

x-Models (will never be AI) will eat the world though, long after the dream of talking to a computer to reserve a table has died, because they are so good at flooding social media with bullshit to facilitate the sales of drop-shipped garbage to hundreds of millions of people.

That being said, it is highly likely that is an extremely large group of people who are so braindead that they need a robot to click through TripAdvisor links for them to create a boring, sterile, assembly-line one-day tour of Rome.

Whether or not those people have enough money to be extracted from them to make running such a service profitable remains to be seen.

Libertarians are the cheapest fucking buys of all time.

They will sell their souls to a man who would grind them into a paste and sell that paste as a protein snack to his cultists-- in exchange for a hollow, symbolic win that either impacts them in no way whatsoever or maliciously hurts people they don't like.

At least with other political groups you have to, you know, BRIBE them.

Libertarians are so used to receiving absolutely nothing that they will mistake the scent of a steak for a full meal.

Yes, they can. Anyone can sue anyone else for any reason.

It will be a colossal waste of everyone's time and money, though, because they will never prevail.

>Can somebody give me a rational take on why?

The current techbro CEO squad is a small group of people who got extraordinarily lucky and made a bunch of money.

The techbro CEO squad takes their luck to be ability, and they think the fact that they have more money than other people means that they're smarter than everyone else. Some members of the techbro CEO squad think of themselves as prophets or messiahs.

In addition to this, the techbro CEO squad is addicted to money and its accumulation. This isn't a "I need more money to live a more comfortable retirement" thing, it is a "my sole purpose for being is the accumulation of wealth" thing. They are more akin to machines whose purpose it is to grab onto as much money as possible than they are actual human beings.

The techbro CEO squad's vast wealth has enabled them to surround themselves with an army of staff whose only job it is to make their dreams a reality and execute their orders. There is a vast, impenetrable field of personnel and money that insulates them from the reality of the world.

So, they think that they're better than anyone else to the point of being god-like, they are sociopaths who only care about money, they are surrounded by an army of yes men, and they have lost (or never had) any connection to the average human being and his or her existence.

They believe that any restriction on their ability to accumulate wealth is an assault on their freedom, an enemy to be defeated, an injustice to be made right by any means possible.

Limits on their ability to pollute, protections for employees operating in the heat or cold or around hazardous materials, regulations designed to prevent market manipulation or money laundering, it is all evil and must be destroyed.

They are willing to dismantle any system to get what they want.

Because they think that they are better than everyone else, the techbro CEO squad does not value consensus or institutional knowledge that has led to regulation slowly building up over centuries in response to events and emergencies: if they don't like it, it must go.

So, the slow infiltration of government by the Peter Theil, Andreessen and Horowitz, Musk, (but mainly their servants) and the rest started a couple of years ago and continues to this day.

tl;dr: Billionaires will rape your grandmother's corpse for lower taxes, harvest and sell her organs for a laugh, then label you a woke communist and kick you off twitter for criticizing them.

> the cashier tested it for cocaine and it came back positive

There is no commercial product capable of testing cash for drugs. Anyone claiming to sell such a product is lying.

There is a wipe, like a baby wipe, that is sold as a "cocaine detection wipe". It is a lie.

It uses a dumbed down version of a spot test that is very good at detecting cocaine, but it also reacts with many other substances that are not cocaine.

The test was dumbed down because the substances needed to make it more accurate are much more dangerous than the cobalt thiocyanate (which is STILL not good for you) used in the "safe" tests.

There are thousands and thousands and thousands of substances that will cause a cocaine detection test to return a positive reaction. One of them is Benadryl. Benadryl causes such a strong and vibrant reaction that you would think the entire object being tested was made of pure cocaine.

If you keep a single packet containing one Benadryl pill in your bag and you use it and while taking it a handful of diphenhydramine (Benadryl) molecules get transferred from your fingers to the outside of the packet, and then you toss the packet into your bag and they get transferred from the packet to the interior of your bag, to a wallet in your bag, to the cash itself, testing the cash in that wallet with a cocaine field test will produce a stronger positive result than if you had rolled up a bill and snorted a line immediately prior to the test and there was still powdered cocaine on the bill.

This is not a joke or exaggeration. If you touch a single Benadryl pill with the tip of your index finger, then poke the tip of your finger to a sheet of paper, then you put that sheet of paper in a printer and a rubber roller in the paper-handling mechanism rolls over the spot you touched, every single sheet of paper printed by that printer for MONTHS will test positively for cocaine. (using the tests that don't require training, PPE, and expensive lab equipment).

Did your totally real and not bullshit cash have drugs on them, or Benadryl, or ANY substance with the ring of carbon atoms that the test detects?

"But this study found 80% of bills had dru..."

Buddy 100% of all bills that have been used just once have actual literal shit, feces, dookie, poop, (and staph!) on them.

There is poop in your wallet right now.

The developers who freely, voluntarily, and willingly work on these projects, min-maxing human suffering to add 0.01% to a cell in a spreadsheet somewhere, deserve everything that's coming for them.