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trod1234

159 karma · joined November 15, 2024

Illegitimi Non Carborundum
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trod1234··on California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month
A study on this is referenced in the The Great Courses, Everyday Engineering series taught by Dr. Stephen Ressler, a Professor Emeritus from the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Any potential engineer watches this as part of their assignments in Intro to Engineering. Lecture 12 iirc.

They referenced a study showing Natural gas power plants emit 0.2% Sulfur Dioxide, 7% NOx, 60% of CO2 compared to coal power plants, and the study only compared single cycle plants, where most are combined cycle that further lower pollution per kWH metrics.

The CO2 in most combined cycle plants is captured as a valuable feedstock for other industrial uses, or sale.

> I'm not sure what California Air Emission Regulatory is.

Its a generalization for the state of Regulatory in California with regards to air standards.

Specifically, I'm referencing the untenable and ever growing sprawl of ad-hoc legislation that is driving the last two refinery's (Chevron) out of California, as well as the bans on any use of certain chemicals like natural gas.

Last I checked there were at least 6-10 partially overlapping AB/SBs that have been passed and are awaiting implementation deadlines. The cost to do anything as a direct result of runaway regulatory is part of why California is having so many problems. The legislature's actions show they don't want people to be able to do business for certain things within California.

trod1234··on California Will Stop Using Coal as a Power Source Next Month
Electricity transfer is orders of magnitude more cheaply transmitted than any physical quantity of gas as the power is up-converted to around 750kV which only wastes a few hundred watts in the actual transmission (across thousands of miles).

California Air Emission Regulatory which is already on the books cannot comply with the plants so it makes sense that they are being built outside the state.

Natural Gas has the benefit of being simple to start up and shut down the needed turbines, compressor, exchanger, 1st and secondary loops based on demand. There's still some pollution, but compared to coal the pollution is a few percent in comparison (afaik). It burns more cleanly. Newer plants usually use the most efficient equipment at that time (within the tradeoffs chosen) so costs are often less (though poor material choices may offset this when corruption/fraud is found).

trod1234··on Private equity is sitting on $5T of existential dread
I don't think there is a valid rationale for this.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of armchair spectators that don't understand how the economy actually functions; and they've got brigades that go after people that do actually know who speak out (based on certain keywords).

As a result, its totally not worth talking about since the point of no return has largely already come and gone and we're stuck in a hysteresis trap.

People don't see how the things we are seeing today were predictable outcomes given choices made at the money-printer level (i.e. Fed/Private Banking).

No deposit requirement, is no reserve money-printing. It always fails, but I'm sure someone will say... but this time will be different. Needless to say, any discussion on economics is basically flame bait these days with a lot of delusional people on both sides of the aisle.

Fractional Banking (RIP, Circa 2020).

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
You seem to have not understood what I said conflating academia with whitepapers and then construct the rest on an improper foundation from there.

Whitepapers aren't the sole domain of academia. What we are talking about aren't hosted on Arxiv. We are talking about industry working groups.

The M3AAWG working group, and browser/CA forum publish RFCs and Whitepapers that professionals in this area do read regularly.

There's been insufficient/no professional outreach about PSL. You can't just do things at large players without disclosure for interop, because you harm others by doing so neglecting the imposing fallout from lack of disclosure on everyone else that's impacted within your sphere of influence which as a company running the second most popular browser is global.

When you do so without first doing certain reasonable and expected things (of any professional organization), you are being grossly negligent. This is sufficient to prove general intent for malice in many cases, a reasonable person in such circumstances should have known better.

This paves the way for proving tortuous or vexatious interference of a contract which is a tort and punishable by law when brought against the entity.

> The PSL is surely an imperfect solution but its solving the problem for the moment.

It is not, because the disclosure hasn't happened properly for interop, and in such circumstances it predictably creates a mountain of problems without visibility; a timebomb/poison pill where crisis arises from the brittle structure later following shock doctrine utilizing the snowball effect (a common tactic of the corrupt and deceiver alike).

Your entire line of reasoning which you constructed is critically flawed. You presume trust is important to this, and that such systems require trust, but trust doesn't have anything to do with the reputational metrics which the systems we are talking about are using to impose cost. Apples to Oranges.

You can't enumerate badness. Lots of professionals know this. Historic reputational blacklists also punish those that are innocent after-the-fact when not properly disclosed, or engineered for due process. A permanent record deprives anyone from using a blacklisted entry after it changes hands from the criminal to some unsuspecting person.

Your reasoning specifically frames a false dichotomy about security. This follows almost identically the same reasoning the Nazi's used (ref at the bottom).

No one is arguing that Safe Browsing and other mechanisms are useful as mitigation, but they are temporary solutions that must be disclosed to a detailed level that allows interoperability to become possible.

If you only tell your friends, and impose those draconian costs on everyone else, you are abusing your privileged position of trust for personal gain (a form of corruption), and causing harm on others even if you can't see it.

Chrome does not have an opt-out. You have to re-compile the browser from scratch to turn those subsystems off. Same with Firefox. That is not allowing you to disable that feature since users aren't reasonably expected to be able to recompile their software to change a setting.

There is no idealism/pacifism here. I'm strictly being pragmatic.

You neglect the harm you don't directly see, in the costs imposed on business. Second, Third, and n-order effects must be considered but have not been (this must necessarily grow in consideration based on the scope/scale of impact).

There are a few areas where doing such blind things may directly threaten existential matters (i.e. food production where failure of logistics lead to shortages, which whipsaw into chaos). It won't happen immediately, and we live in a growingly brittle but still somewhat resilient society, but it will happen eventually if such harm is adopted and allowed as standard practice; though the method is indirect the scope starts off large.

If you only look through a lens at a small part of the cycle of the dynamics that favors your argument which you set in motion, ignoring everything else; that is called cherry-picking or also commonly known as the fallacy of isolation.

Practically speaking, that line of reasoning is without foundational support and unsound. Its important to properly discern and reason about things as they actually exist in reality.

Competent professionalism is not an idealistic perspective. The harm naturally comes when one doesn't meet well established professional requirements. When the rule of law fails to hold destructive people to account for their actions; that's a three-alarm fire as a warning sign of impending societal collapse. The harms of which are incalculable.

Ref: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

(Your implications follow this part closely): That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

    -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
I agree this isn't knowledge that takes a lot. The problem is these companies don't explain why they do what they do, in fact a lot of security stuff along these lines in the past has been tight-lipped secrecy bound stuff. You can wonder, but the answer isn't out there unless you know an insider willing to break a broadly worded NDA (not gonna happen, and some are quite broad).

The idea to segment certain types of traffic to different domains isn't that new. For example segmenting certain mail servers by marketing or transactional types into subdomains was done as far back as 2010, but it wasn't explained in whitepapers until around 2016 or 2017, where there was already gathered irrefutable evidence that reputational systems had been put in place and the rules for those damaged people running small email servers who were being illegitimately blocked from delivery; for years with no recourse or disclosure just imposed cost.

Once they published the whitepapers on that, professionals were on board because they specified what they were looking for, and how it should function. Basic Engineering stuff that people who manage and build these systems need to know to interoperate.

These things need professional outreach that standardizes it in some form or another, that's not a one-off blog post imo, and that must fully specify function, requirement, feedback mechanisms, and expectations of how its supposed to work; basic engineering stuff.

The PSL is just the same thing all over again. Big Tech just starts doing something silently that directly imposes cost on others, they don't say what they are doing. Then when it becomes too costly they try to offload it to others calling for support, though if they only do halfsies in a blog post buried in noise, they are only looking for plausible deniability.

The benefit in doing this is in anti-competitive behavior.

Incidentally, while separating subdomains for email servers has been standard practice for awhile now, recently these companies once again changed the reputational weights for things, and they aren't talking. Now its a whole domain as a single reputational namespace not just breakage at the subdomain (bb.aa.com.). No outreach on that as far as I've seen.

There are ways to do things correctly, and then there are ways to do things anti-competitively and coercively. The incentives matched to the outcomes point to which one that happens to be.

How you do something is more important than that you did something in these cases.

If you as a company don't do professional outreach about such changes or standards, and you arbitrarily choose to require something that isn't properly disclosed punishing everyone that hasn't received disclosure; that in my mind is a fair and reasonable case for either gross negligence (for general intent to prove malice) or tortuous interference with third-party companies businesses.

That question which you mentioned about asking in an interview (iirc) was actually asked in an Ignite interview, but was cut out from the recordings later, and the answer was we can't talk about what other departments are doing. They may have followed-up on that elsewhere but I never saw anything related to it.

It is critically important to know the reasons why things are structured a certain way or happen; in order to be able to interoperate. This is and has been known and repeated many times since the adoption of OSI & TCP in the 80s/90s with regards to interoperability of systems.

Blindly copying what others do is a recipe for disaster and isn't justifiable in terms of cost, and competent professional's don't roll the dice like that on large projects of that caliber of expense.

This stuff isn't straight forward either. Like knowing where the reputational namespace stops, what the ramp-up time (dm/dt) is for volume metrics to warm up a server at each provider, and objective indicators associated with when you go above that arbitrarily designed rate. (hint: non-deterministic hidden states) If it takes a month to perfectly warm a new server up without reputational consequences by an insider that knows, that's extra cost imposed on the company by that platform (whom you are competing against for email services).

No disclosure means starting over every time trying to guess at what they are doing, and having breakage later when they change things.

> reddit...

A lot of professionals no longer use reddit anymore because its a bot filled echo chamber that wastes valuable time.

Moderators there often remove posts regularly for simple disagreement, conflicts of interest, or to remove access to detailed solutions or methodology.

For an example of all that's wrong there, look to that CodingBootCamp reddit. There's a guy that's a moderator there that's been, in all probability, using a bot to destroy a competitors reputation and harass them for years, attacking the owners, execs, and going so far as to harass and stalk their children; while violating the Moderator Code of Contact. Crazy and toxic stuff. ---

You can't ever meet professional standards if you don't communicate or properly disclose interop requirements when complex systems are involved.

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
> There should be a concept....

There is. It is called ponzi, and its illegal, but in most cases its become indirect enough in the consequences without proper guard rails/accountability that its now allowed by most publicly traded business today (through clever deception).

Generally, it involves three phases:

1st: Front-loaded benefits in CapEx funding meeting customer/investor expectations regardless of cost.

2nd: Inflection point of momentum where CapEx falls off, a brief period where income meets costs.

3rd: Enshittification - momentum/acceleration reverses to the negative, failure of services as the system is continually hollowed out and cost exceeds income.

This is seen in the S-growth or S-adoption curves in business starting to become visible towards the late 1970s and progressively increasing exponentially thereafter in time.

Most companies jettison (sell/off or merge) or close down services before they hit the 3rd stage where the service objectively can be seen as unprofitable by associated investors. The ones that don't are state-funded apparatus.

This concept drives almost everything we see today in modern society and in the market there are parallels and indirect consequences fully described back in the 1950's by Mises with regards to money-printing regardless of its form (i.e. debt that is not reserve backed (Basel3), synthetic shares, paper warrants (Comex), Bonds (with reporting loophole hold to maturity), flier miles, credit card rewards, etc).

The structure and its flaws remain foundationally intractable. This is how you profit and grow bigger off destroying the market. Eventually consolidation leaves state apparatus in place of a market.

No market can compete with slave labor, which is what state-funded apparatus use indirectly through money-printing/currency debasement. Its not considered a tax, and its not given willingly. Its extracted labor.

Those that have lived through these times see the drastic reduction of options in available products that have naturally sieved to the point where shortages are now regularly occuring (for those with a discerning eye). There are a lot of moving factors, but the structure and their inevitable trends are well known structures, at least in certain circles.

In seriousness, the totality of Socio-economic collapse is more probable than a lot of other potential futures, as a result of this. Collapse has happened many times throughout history in relation to money-printing.

Always before, we were not in ecological overshoot for our population, let alone being in this state for 2 full generations. Catton/Malthus paint a grim picture of the outcomes but no one of action pays attention to these things. Its all largely drowned out by the noise of bots.

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
> But you're right, complaining about big tech surveillance didn't help with making that point at all.

I disagree. Everyone with a brain is thinking it. Its important to address what your audience may be thinking especially given the other factors in this which I've mentioned in other responses related to gross negligence.

Technical capability exists to narrowly define blacklists, and they chose a gross negligence route (baby with bathwater), without providing notice.

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
Eric, I think it appropriate to mention, and I'd like to point out the lack of any real documentation (reaching a professional level) related to PSL on the professional working groups touching on these things (i.e. M3AAWG).

There are only two blog posts on M3AAWG in 2023 where it had been used silently (apparently for years), but was calling for support. I would think if it were an industry recognized initiative it would have the appropriate documents/whitepapers published on it in the industry working group tasked with these things. These people are supposed to be engineer's after all. AFAIK this hasn't happened aside from a brief-after-action with requests for support which is highly problematic.

When there is no professional outreach (via working group or trade group), its real hard to say that this isn't just gross negligence on google's part. M3AAWG has hundreds if not thousand's of whitepapers each hundreds of pages. A single blog post or two that mention it insufficiently, won't rationally negate this claim supporting gross negligence.

Why do I mention Gross negligence?, when coupled with loss, it is sufficient in many cases to support a finding of 'malice' without specific intent (i.e. general intent), especially when such an entity has little/no credibility, but is overshadowed by power/authority that is undeserved. Deceitful people that reasonably should know the consequences will go bad, often purposefully structure towards general intent to avoid legal complications and the legal system has evolved. I am not a lawyer, but this paraphrase about gross negligence/general intent/malice did come from a lawyer, its not meant or intended for use as legal advice in paraphrase form, so standard IANAL disclaimer applies. If the that is needed, consult a qualified professional for a specific distinction on this.

The company is more than technically capable of narrowly defining blacklists and providing due process and appropriate noticing requirements.

The situation begs questions of torturous interference, and whether the PSL is being used as an anti-competive mechanistic moat to prevent competitors from entering the market by imposing additional cost arbitrarily on competitors that is assymetric to the costs such companies have with competing services (as oligopoly/monopoly).

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
I disagree, as a professional in this field for over a decade.

For this to be a legitimately backed statement, professional's would have needed to know about the PSL. This is largely unmet.

For it to be met, there would need to be documentation in the form of RFC's and whitepapers in industry working groups which would be needed. This didn't happen.

M3AAWG only has two blog post mentions, and that's only after the great layoffs of 2023, and only that its being used by volunteers and needs support. No discussion about organization, what its being used for, process/due process, etc.

It wholly lacks the needed outreach to professionals in order to make such a statement and have it be true.

trod1234··on Google Safe Browsing incident
Yes, its generally good advice to keep user content on a separate domain.

That said, there are a number of IT professionals that aren't aware of the PSL as these are largely initiatives that didn't exist prior to 2023 and don't get a lot of advertisement, or even a requirement. They largely just started being used silently by big players which itself presents issues.

There are hundreds if not thousands of whitepapers on industry, and afaik there's only one or two places its mentioned in industry working groups, and those were in blog posts, not whitepapers (at M3AAWG). There's no real documentation of the organization, what its for, and how it should be used in any of the working group whitepapers. Just that it is being used and needs support; not something professional's would pay attention to imo.

> Second, they should be using the public suffix list

This is flawed reasoning as is. Its hard to claim this with a basis when professionals don't know about this, a small subset just arbitrarily started doing this, and seems more like false justification after-the-fact for throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Security is everyone's responsibility, and Google could have narrowly tailored the offending domain name accesses instead of blocking the top-level. They didn't do that, and worse that behavior could even be automated in a way that the process could be extended and there could be a noticing period to the toplevel provider before it started hitting everyone's devices. They also didn't do that apparently.

Regardless, no single entity should be able to dictate what other people perceive or see arbitrarily from their devices (without a choice; opt-in) but that is what they've designed these systems to do.

Enumerating badness doesn't work. Worse, say the domain names get reassigned to another unrelated customer.

Those people are different people, but they are still blocked as happens with small mail servers quite often. Who is responsible when someone who hasn't been engaged with phishing is being arbitrarily punished without due process. Who is to say that google isn't doing this purposefully to retain their monopolies for services they also provide.

Its a perilous torturous path where trust cannot be given because they've violated that trust in the past, and have little credibility with all net incentives towards their own profit at the expense of others. They are even willing to regularly break the law, and have never been held to account for it. (i.e. Google Maps WIFI wiretapping).

Hanlon's razor is a joke intended as a joke, but there are people that use it literally and inappropriately to deceitfully take advantage of others.

Gross negligence coupled with some form of loss is sufficient for general intent which makes the associated actions malicious/malice.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water without telling anyone or without warning, is gross negligence.

trod1234··on Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025
Unfortunately that is just how it is on biased platforms, but its not like that everywhere yet. It is like a page out of Atlas Shrugged though.

All the parasites ended up dying in that book when all the intelligent people decided to just step back and let natural human tendency and the momentum they created do what it was always going to do. All those people were deluded into thinking they could just make a law without paying respect to the mechanics that made things work. Ayn Rand though is also quite deluded in that her ideas don't work without eliminating inheritance and money-printing.

Slavery is intolerable in any form.

trod1234··on Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance
More than likely that conjectured capability is the yesteryear Predator.

Seems tech may have received some upgrades:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/27/238884/the-penta...

There was also a hot-air balloon program that would persist at stationary at high altitude and track all moving targets over a metropolitan area for up to a month without maintenance.

The news article which said the project was called "Basilisk Stare", seems to have vanished now though from all search results. Edit: Maybe I'm misremembering and its actually Gorgon Stare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

trod1234··on Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance
In fairness, almost all of this is pure conjecture aside from Bin Laden which has had documents and accounts on record released/declassified.

We don't actually know how these entities do certain things because they don't have credibility, and it is well known that they lie to protect tradecraft.

trod1234··on Predator drones shift from border patrol to protest surveillance
Uhh, there is no used to (past tense). Its important to have a faith-based belief system you can fall back on when you are subjected to torture.

I'm with the greeks on this, which is what they try to communicate in and through their stories.

TL;DR

The gods exist, they walk among us, they are powerful, they look just like humans, they are intelligent cruel deceptive and capricious. They are not there for your benefit.

You survive your encounters with them by being observant and measured, and follow a framework based in objective reality which could be intelligence and a fair bit of luck; or you don't.

Not all religions have all powerful protective father figures that will shield you from everything stunting and coddling you. Most in fact don't if you pay attention.

This gem is littered throughout greek mythology especially heavily in the Odyssey.

trod1234··on US Launches Financial Rescue of Argentina, Treasury Buys Pesos
The nature of human organization and political structure is based on a weighted asymmetry of power where some autonomy is given up in exchange for a greater survive-ability. This is inherent in the basic understanding of the social contract theory.

The structure of the system itself has flaws in the same way, because of that asymmetry, on the positive side it allows someone capable to do great things with the resources available, but equally when you have a rotten cancerous parasitic crop of leaders, it spreads that corruption and toxic love everywhere just like Hexxus as he gets out of the prison.

American's aren't on board when that sacred promise is broken by oathbreakers. It does take time for the abuses to accumulate before a population will be spurned to action, it always happens like this during the fall of empires.

The environment becomes so disadvantaged and rife with abuse that the average person understands that there is no out, you can't get away, there is only through. The same as was brilliant depicted in Andor.

People will starve, but the abuses are necessary to mobilize the population to action. It doesn't happen otherwise because the consequence is too great (existentially so).

trod1234··on Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025
Your just looking at pool walking down a concentration gradient. When everyone has access, and such access eliminated more jobs than created, do you think the investment was warranted. Value is only ever based in human action; when the basis for the reasoning is shown to be false or removed it becomes something similar to tulip mania.
trod1234··on Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025
Opportunity costs don't destroy the economy.

Money-printing does destroy the economy on a lag, specifically when the production has such catastrophic shortfall that it shows itself to be ponzi without tangible value or benefit. Value being based entirely in human action.

When that happens, its basically slave labor silently extracted from the population through inflation. Such things historically always trigger other cascading failures.

trod1234··on Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025
One must naturally make assumptions when responding to something that is poorly defined or communicated. That's just how it is. That's an issue for the original poster, not the responder.

The terminology of AI has a strong link with LLMs/GenAI. Quite reasonable.

As for code/architecture/infrastructure I like those things too. You do have to shape your communications to the audience you are talking to though. A lot of the products have eliminated the demand for such jobs, and its a false elimination so there will be an overcorrection later in a whipsaw, but by that time I'll have changed careers because the jobs weren't there. I'm an architect, with 10+ years of experience, not a single job offer in 2 years with tens of thousands of submissions in that time.

If there is no economic opportunity you have to go where the jobs are. When executives play stupid games based in monopoly to drive wages down, they win stupid prizes.

Sometime around 2 years is the max time-frame before you get brain drain for these specialized fields, and when that happens those people stop contributing to the overall public parts of the sector entirely. They take their expertise, and use it for themselves only, because that is the only value it can provide and there's no winning when the economy becomes delusional and divorced from reality.

You have AI eliminating demand for specialized labor that requires at least 5 years of experience to operate competently, AI flooding the communication space with jammed speech (for hiring through a mechanism similar to RNA interference), and you have professional certificate providers retiring all benefits, and long-lasting certificates that prove competency on top of the coordinated layoffs by big tech in the same time period. Eliminating the certificate path as a viable option for the competent but un-accredited through university.

You've got a dead industry. Its dead, but it doesn't know it yet. Such is the problem with chaotic whipsaws and cascading failures that occur on a lag. By the time the problem is recognized, it will be too late to correct (because of hysteresis).

Such aggregate stupidity in collapsing the labor pool is why there is a silent collapse going on in the industry, and why so many people cannot find work.

The level of work that can be expected now in such places because of such ill will by industry is abyssal.

Given such fierce loss and arbitrarily enforced competition, who in their right mind would actually design resilient infrastructure properly; knowing it will chug away for years without issue after they lay you off with no intent towards maintenance (making money all that time).

A time is fast approaching where you won't find the people competent enough to know how to do the job right, at any price.

trod1234··on Peter Thiel, Would-Be Philosopher King, Takes on Democracy
The man certainly isn't a philosopher king, and in some ways; he's quite unhinged and twisted in his viewpoints, and worst of all blind to the consequences of his actions.
trod1234··on America is now one big bet on AI
The vast generalized systemic malaise of corruption that afflicts America both in business, and politics.

It is most commonly expressed in process which is designed to isolate, strip of agency, impose cognitive dissonance (through deception and lies), create trauma loops (structured circularly with push-pull dynamics), and utilize sophisticated psychological blindspots that every person has; primarily to induce inconsistent internal states of confusion beneath cognition, which creates psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect.

Define intolerable and torturous acts rationally by functional element from case studies, you will find the elements in aggregate nearly everywhere you look. That wasn't always the case.

Its under different names, and called different things but the elements are all there. Education, Business, Politics, the sheer number of places is endless. The work of a generation.

For example, Master Data Management is all about creating dossiers of customers for targeting your most profitable customers with extras; while simultaneously reducing finite resources required by basic services that are given to your baseline customer (beyond the point of service failure, just shy of the point of fraud).

Ever wonder about that systemic issue where a ticket you opened, described it properly, and it has a straightforward resolution, but its automatically closed as resolved 20-30 days later with no action taken and no reprimand or escalation path that's effective and it can't be reopened. Or that CSR doom loop where they transfer you so many times taking advantage of the trunk line timeout after a signaling change where the phone disconnects (x minutes after the first signaled transfer), or the lies about higher than normal call volume which aren't actually based on averages and always apply... The loss of some needed benefit because someone decided in error that requirements weren't met for that benefit, depriving you immediately, with no recourse. Like paypall freezing your connected bank account because of a chargeback that was illegitimate on the sellers side.

People blind themselves because this is everywhere, and it shouldn't be, but there is no one capable of stopping it that isn't also more incentivized to continue it for profit.

Who benefits, what recourse, what's required for a rule of law, and what happened in the two decades leading up to 1776 that showed what happens when a rule of law no longer functions.

Coercion is the purposeful application of psychological stress beyond the point of coping to induce outcomes.

While a little funny, if it weren't so close to the truth Agents of Shield got this mostly right except that its everywhere: "Take a deep breath, calm your mind, compliance will be rewarded. Are you willing to comply?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEikUtQKbHk

trod1234··on America is now one big bet on AI
There aren't enough jobs because we are stuck in a money-printing loop thanks to the baby boomers. The dynamics and debasement floor prevent new entrants from entering the market while regulation cripples those trying to keep things going. Concentrating and sieving the money-supply into non-productive companies on a moonshot bet to eliminate capital formation and one party that forms the basis for the economic cycle.

Demographics are destiny. Its pretty clear that we'll be taking the accelerated japan route, and the worst of that with japan is the fact that we bailed it out, no ones around to bail us out.

We basically have a generation of children who are now the old, who spurned and wasted the resources given to them in poor stewardship, and who failed to pass them and the advantaged environment on to their children, instead choosing tyrannical to disadvantage their children through control and clutching power to the last of their days and all the destruction that comes thereafter. A fall of empire.

They clutched at the resources so heavily and disadvantaged their own children to the point where significantly less people were in a position to actually be having children themselves, both because of the intolerable and torturous acts which have become so commonplace today but also the resources required to keep the old alive significantly outweighed the resources to foster children. There is an opportunity cost for everything. A Deflationary depopulation is almost inevitable.

trod1234··on Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity
That's a false dichotomy.

You also neglect that all business must necessarily account for inflation in their cost model (an impossible task). Enshittification is just the end result of money-printing through banking loans on the business cycle, that's why it follows the same adoption curves as ponzi.

The end result of that cycle is predictable, and has been discussed quite rationally but many people don't actually read books these days so its become lost knowledge.

The sieving and centralizing monopolization we see all comes from those entities being closer to the source of money than individuals. The systems of banking today neglect the true sources of the wealth of nations instead utilizing slave labor through clever recapture (of debasement lost to inflation). In aggregate these things creates a system where over-expenditure must be paid for by your children's distributed slavery; creating a hellscape of an environment where they are disadvantaged and may not survive. Its al indirect, but indirect things can be quite powerful and if you don't have the mind to grasp it your just trapped like an animal, not given the choice. A slave.

Usury eventually and inevitably gets to catastrophic levels given sufficient time, as all positive feedback systems do, left unattended.

trod1234··on Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity
School in the last 50 years was never about education. It was about inducing a level of thought control and torturing the intelligent/competent to reduce their number to only those that can be controlled, and as systems of disadvantaging those that might create wealth, through economic warfare.

Hanlon's razor is also something that has been repeated so many times its not even funny anymore, and it originated as a joke in a joke book despite the revisionists trying to change that. It has no valid basis for the claims it makes.

Malice exists, and unfortunately quite a lot of people are malicious today and don't realize it. This is how evil works. It blinds the individual to the destructive consequences of their actions, and rhetoric designed to allow those people to continue in such delusions abound.

Gross Negligence coupled with loss is sufficient to show general intent which is need definitionally to show malice. If you are grossly negligent, and you caused loss, you are acting with malice even if you don't recognize that you are doing so. These are basic things that are no longer taught, that evil people take advantage of; unfortunately. The only way to not be evil is to always question from multiple perspectives, and don't repeat destructive actions when it may benefit you as an individual.

This article is also pushing for a narrative as soft propaganda. It seems like it might be worth listening to at a cursory level, but that's how influential propaganda works.

You can say something influential composed with certain elements, and still be completely wrong in what you are saying. Those that can't tell it for what it is, will be the victims, or they will find other victims to sacrifice in their place.

trod1234··on AI-powered open-source code laundering
Until now, people have had the leverage/cost asymmetry in their favor where they could easily differentiate and make rational choices.

AI has tipped that nuanced balance in a way that is both destructive, and unsustainable. Just like any other fraud or ponzi.

Cost/loss constraint function now favors the unskilled, blind, destructive individual running an LLM who spits on all those that act with good faith. Quite twisted.

trod1234··on Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs
You don't get anything tangible from that noisy data. IT has been taking the brunt, and you only see labor market changes after they happen by a significant lag. Its premature to do this type of study and try to discount what people on the street who are being impacted are saying.
trod1234··on There is a huge pool of exceptional junior engineers
In fairness, many employers exploit their workers. Wages have been supressed for multiple decades. Rights stripped through arbitrary pay-for-play work agreements, etc.

Eventually you lose all goodwill and get a saturation of ill-will related to that exploitation, debt slavery through student loans or worse. Quite a lot of business people blind themselves to the reality.

Those that drink the kool-aid are always in the next round of layoffs, after they pulled 80 hour weeks to have a project come in on time. Its not reddit fueling this, its bad business behavior at scale unfortunately.

No one can fool everyone all the time. The deceivers are always eventually found out, and then its "we can't find anyone"...

The young listen to the stories of people who have accrued a certain amount of experience who are in their 40s now, and quite a lot of those stories are not success but rather exploitation, use and abuse, oh and now all the jobs went to AI... its a trend, and its going to get real bad because the old needed the young to take over those jobs to fuel their money-printing debt spree over the past 30 years. Demographics are destiny, and you either get slave labor, or you get movements towards letting things rot when the environment reaches a certain threshold, and is disadvantaged in the fullest sense of the term.

trod1234··on People got together to stop a school shooting before it happened
The simple fact of the matter is, everyone breaks with sufficient exposure to unending abuse. In the literature, this is rightfully called by its real name, torture. Everyone breaks with sufficient exposure, they may break by dissassociation, or they may break psychotically, but its semi-lucid psychosis seeking annihilation (capable of planning). This has been known since at least the 1950s, and ignored through willful blindness of the people in positions of responsibility and accountability.

People often say they'll know torture when they see it, but in practice most people are completely blind and they don't properly or rigorously compare torture with abuse, nor do they know how it works so they don't recognize it.

All it takes is a select set of elements, a set of structures, and a little clustering, and even you can be made to do horrible things, solely as a matter of sufficient exposure.

Those elements are isolation, lack of agency, coercion with perceived or real loss. Structure are trauma loops where you have alternating strict and lenient stages (push pull). Clustering include specific items that dramatically increase suggestibility to induce psychological stress beyond the point of coping for physiological effect. These include psychological blindspots we all have which occur beneath our perception when triggered. There are 6 or 7 in total, most are covered by Robert Cialdini, and when they are used to create an inconsistent internal mental state that's stress you can't perceptually recognize. Coping can be done for some if you know the patterns but there is no coping with distorted reflected appraisal. The pariah effect, which is enforced through social media and other material. The Stasi called this Zersetzung. Its been used and originates with many Communist/Marxist based groups, but recently includes many corporations. Sad times.

If you as a group degrade a human being, destroying their mind to the point where they are no longer sane; that's quite an evil which is not having consequences enforced. When the law defends such destructive and evil behavior by not stopping it; the rule of law no longer exists. Its a rule by law. Violence is what naturally follows.

If you want to prevent violence, you need to reform and correct the deficiencies that have now failed to allow non-violent conflict resolution. Any choice that does not lead to that resolution is a choice for the support of violence, albeit indirect.

These things were commonly known at one point in time, but education of such has been withheld and we see the effect that has had. Shock doctrine being used to push narratives and solutions which are not in fact solutions; towards ever greater control. A lot of which is intolerable taken to a long-standing logical conclusion.

Most people today seek a delusional view of the world, they are willfully blind, and have sought a world where bad things don't happen, and knowledge of such bad things actually happening is the same as acting to do those bad things. Communication of such things is the same as doing those things, or supporting those things. The author's right to depict horrible things to promote a common good being stripped from literature/media citing it induces (when it may not). This line of reasoning is obviously fallacy but they follow the "What they don't perceive, doesn't exist." dogma.

This may work right up until an out-of-context problem arises from chaos and forces extinction, or a collapse.

Evil starts with complacency (sloth) and the induced choice towards willful blindness of the consequences of each persons individual choices.

It's well documented that you don't argue with Evil, it can't be reasoned with, you can only stop it from harming others, and that is a good thing when properly/rigorously identified and action taken.

For example, you won't see any good person defending the Nazi Holocaust. Edit: Simple reasonable, and well known things, and the bot swarm is already busy downvoting it out of view. Goes to show you why people are being induced towards blindness. Evil people simply don't want you to know about these things, and the biggest problem with such people is they don't realize they are evil.

trod1234··on Don't Become a Scientist (1999)
The problem with your take is that you neglect the nuanced difference between demand and need.

Demand is where people are willing to pay you at the right price, and you aren't struggling to find work. Need is where they aren't, and you are struggling, and people only get jobs when there is suitable demand.

Jobs where there is great need but distortions that cause zero or extremely low demand, you don't get people. These jobs have great need, but there is no economic benefit that justifies the people development cost for that crop. These resources are wasted resources after demand is met.

A lot of this is basic economics, and the tragedy is that just like in science, structure dictates function. Distortions beget more distortions, and when they are not based in the core principles that determine wealth of a nation, then they may become chaotic at which point structure fails.

The lesson the OP author is trying to make is, make sure the juice is worth the squeeze, and be extremely discerning because there are a lot of people that will lie for imaginary personal benefits. Enough that he says don't do it, and that's coming from an insider who has known and seen how it goes bad in detail, but was still successful.

trod1234··on Leading computer science professor says 'everybody' is struggling to get jobs
I hate to say this but it is not just the curriculums.

A lot of teachers are just plain out bad at teaching. For quite a lot its not their fault, they were taught flawed pedagogy and just blindly follow what they know like trained monkeys despite how ineffective it is.

If you've ever heard the phrase, "if you are not struggling, you are not learning", you know that quite a lot of people have been twisted by the beast that is education. Such tools usually follow and originate in actual torture techniques, but that is obscured purposefully to the unwary. Paulo Freire's pedagogy follows this.

There is no longer any place in academia for competency, or accountability. Its been destroyed and sieved for decades, and eventually there's no turning back. You hit a critical point. That unfortunately, in my view, is where we stand today.

All except the top 0.1% of the competent people were driven out through social harassment, the remainder eventually conformed to the lower demands because they made the pool of people who remained looked bad. There is no economic benefit to good teaching, and most teachers overall fail, and even the good ones fail too because education is a sieve process and poisoned students coming in may not overcome the adverse effects despite perfect effort and knowledge (which is rare). I'm not saying all do, but the vast majority with few exception, remain poisoning minds; and those are people who can't be fired and must be waited out to retirement.

The same thing happens with any government organization where you can't fire such chaff, and these teachers who are often unfit in the profession are who get to teach your children, and determine whether they become engineers or other productive members; that is unless you spend hundreds of thousands on a private school of repute (which are rare, and highly selective).

The dominant pedagogy has gone by many names, by-rote teaching, lying to children, common core... aimed at depriving people of the most basic skills needed to get to the end-point.

The system certainly won't be refining any Einsteins, it will be destroying them before they even consider picking up Differential Equations at 16. They won't have the background to even get interested because the curricula has been turned into a torture machine and their prospects poisoned before they knew it.

A few years ago we hit a critical threshold, mostly silently, for credibility that there will be economic benefit. School Administrations have done the unacceptable, moved goalposts, and done everything in their power to incentivize the 'forever' student.

Families today have watched those that have gotten those degrees (at around a 1-3% pass rate) unable to get jobs, they aren't seeing the economic returns, and the debt crushes those people. This is why there are fewer children today. The group of your most productive people are fallow.

CS has one of the highest unemployment rates at around 70% according to BLS data. ECE pass rate while somewhat better (but not much) requires mind-destroying classes, compressed into time that no working adult would be required to work (>40h/wk), and perfect recovery from the sophisticated torture techniques used which destroy any intuition.

Education today is more about hobbling the student with trauma so they'll remain a student forever, while maintaining the lie that they can have a better life if they complete something they do their best to prevent sometimes through quite arbitrary means.

Math is taught from Algebra in K-12 on, following a lying to children approach. The good teachers who buck the trend and excel competently are so rare you might find only 1 in a county, and they have not been rewarded; in fact they've been passed up for higher credentialed peers who couldn't teach.

There comes a point where you just have to gut everything and go back to the way things worked. A working system. For teaching that's a first-principled approach following the greeks, where every teacher must follow it without exception, with strict requirements to maintain those standards and psychological support for students who may have had such trauma imposed.

The last thing that should ever happen is an Algebra student getting to Trigonometry and immediately failing because they were taught a flawed version, and Geometry was passed, but not a 'true' Algebra, and by that point you can't go back because that Algebra professor burnt the bridges on a lag (without accountability).

The problems we face today are largely self-inflicted, through blind destructive people who won't stop unless someone else stops them, and they have removed any ability to stop them non-violently following Tolstoy's philosophy, and utilizing existing structure not unlike any other parasite/cancer that tries to kill its host.

Evil people are those that are blind to the consequences of their actions and continue regardless. History has a lot to say about how this impacts the fall of empires, and we will be living through a fall; and proper education has been purposefully withheld to create environments of people follow a complete compromise, succumbing to systems of control.

trod1234··on If you are harassed by lasers
A lot of helicopters today are being used to harass entire neighborhoods where complaints to local government go completely unresolved, so I can emphasize with that situation, not that I'd ever do something that stupid.

Its not uncommon to have them hovering for 1-2 hours straight 3-7 times a week, every week, at times with no active calls on the community police dashboard almost entirely between 11pm and 4am, often less than 1000 feet in altitude (high dBs enough to shake windows).

That aside, using a helicopter as a broadcast mechanism over a loudspeaker to a neighborhood is entirely unacceptable during hours people normally sleep.

Everyone is complaining and they've been doing that at least 3 years now.

How many times can you hear, "Missing person, or Felony Suspect", black shirt, denim pants, black suspect, call 911", or "suspicious person, black hoodie, call 911", before they lose all credibility. Around 10?

It seems really racist too, always hispanic or black, where the descriptions provided apply to most if not all people of those demographics.

Makes the average person feel like we live in a police state without due process or a rule of law when the only means to resolve is front-of-line blocked through local government which ignores complaints.

I shouldn't be hearing this at 2am regularly, some people work.

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