zelon88

When the federal government does it, they approach an individual who is usually in federal custody. Then they offer a reduced penalty for whatever crime they've committed in exchange for cooperation, or acceptance of a job proposal, or something.

The individual is therefore incentivized against the organization they started at. They were just purchased away from that life. For a price that was probably reasonable. The expectation then is that the individual will cut ties with his old way of doing things and take steps to mitigate any threats from that former life.

The individual then goes through literally 250mb of PDF employment forms where they have to read and agree to a variety of legal punishments for failing the federal government in a variety of ways. They accept personal liability for the job, meaning they have some reason to follow the rules.

Not Musks team. They don't have any of that personal liability, and they get full access to data that causes these agencies to violate their own security and privacy policies. Then they go away with that data, without following any SOPs or chain of custody requirements, without any oversight, and they do whatever they want with it. They use it on personal devices that could be compromised and the government would never know because the data was taken out of scope of their IDS.

Lets say they don't get directly blackmailed, but because this person used to be in a hacker gang they have backdoors on their personal systems from the gang that they are unaware of. We just don't know, and there's no way to make sure the data is being kept safe, no way to monitor what devices it gets put on, no way to ensure anything.

It's just bad security posture all around to be doing this. But I guess that's only true if the goal is an authentic audit. That isn't the goal. Gutting federal agencies and funneling money and information to fascists is the obvious goal here.

Can't you set your user agent to something else? Like Firefox or Chrome.

$1bn / 200k people is $5k each. For a drug that probably costs $4. When you mark up the cost of saving a life by 1,200% I don't think you get to call that "wealth creation" or "saving lives" or even "preventing death". That's called "extortion."

He's at USAID because USAID ended apartheid in South Africa, which Elon Musk grew up in. [1] But not just "grew up in" by happenstance. His grandfather selected South Africa and Apartheid specifically for the privileges because they were Nazi sympathizers [2][3].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/world/africa/elon-musk-so... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman [3] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-world-accor...

You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market.

That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.

Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.

> then employees will be incentivized to maintain the status quo instead making decisions to make the company successful.

Therein lies the problem.

Capitalists believe these two things are exclusionary to one another. They believe that you cannot have an unsuccessful product line, or "status quo" and still be successful. They want to see comfy upward trending lines on their charts and graphs.

But nobody stopped to consider that;

1) If the business is operating with positive cashflow, and,

2) If the business is meeting it's commitment to consumers, shareholders, and employees, and,

3) If the business has no direct existential threat to it's market share, then;

That business is successful. By your own definition. Stop trying to take over the world. It's selfish, unsustainable, and pedantic. Support your workers. Well. Put value back into the economy. Stop being a greedy POS.

Considering someone or some activity to be criminal, and accusing them of being a criminal, are two completely different things.

I consider most financial institutions to be criminal because it is always their clear intention to circumvent the spirit of the law as closely as possible. The intention is to reap the benefits of breaking the law, without the risk of consequence. When the pitchforks come, these are going to be the criminals being chased down the street.

By the same token, I do not consider a parent who writes a bad check for groceries to be a criminal.

In reality, what is more damaging for the environment?

Replacing a 2019 Toyota Rav4 with a 2025 Tesla in North America, or.....

Replacing a 1985 VW Jetta with a 2019 Toyota Rav4 in India?

I see YouTube videos all the time where people in third world countries are using turn of the century hit-and-miss engines to power things like water pumps or machine tools. These countries are leaking countless gallons of oil and fuel into the ground using engines and equipment that are over 100 years old when Habor Freight sells brand new engines for $150.

To me, the ease with which you can sell a new car to a yuppy in the USA (who doesn't even need a new car) is baffling. Dollar for dollar, there is so much low hanging fruit. Don't get me wrong, I want to see first world countries lead the charge, but yuppys need to be more realistic in their "environmental" decision making. There is nothing frugal or environmental about having a 20" touch screen in the dash, or replacing your >5 year old car.

And yet you've developed this knowledge for yourself that applies to other things. Among them you develop probably the most imperative skill which practically nobody focuses on; problem solving. And if you've got kids that share your interests they get that knowledge and experience also.

Humans need hobbies. Humans need to explore their curiosities. If you're not doing this you're hiking or biking or gaming or going to the gym or kayaking or.... something equally useless.

Most customers use your product because it was on the first page of their Google search results.

The only people who's reputation gets ruined are the D-Level Directors and Managers who run this stuff and regularly run into budget or resource shortfalls that prevent them from doing all that they are capable of doing.

When I was young I started my career working in manufacturing. Specifically machine shops with presses, CNC machines, EDM machines, ect...

You would be amazed at the level of hazard people are willing to accept. For example, I recall running one machine, a 300 ton press with an 84"x54" bed and 24" of stroke. It was 25 feet tall and we nicknamed this one Optimus Prime. When Optimus was warmed up he would spit warm hydraulic oil all over the place. A nice fine mist along with a slurry of hydraulic rain drops would cover the area. The solution was to wear Weimao hats made out of disposable cardboard.

Another machine was a 50+ year old roll form machine. How I did not lose my life on this machine is beyond me. Modern machines feed the material automatically and have clutches and brakes with optical sensors so they can stop on a dime. This one literally used inertia and a massive flywheel to function. You got the rollers spinning and fed the material into the first roller, then as it came out you had to guide the material into the next roller. Manually. In between spinning rollers. With your hands. And the machine had a 1,000lb flywheel that gave the whole thing intertia. You only needed to give it throttle once, and the whole machine would spin for 30+ seconds whether it was forming material, or your arm, or whatever. Chances are it would have sucked an entire human into the rollers on one blip of the throttle. And the coup de grâce was the throttle was a 50lb lever on a swing pivot. If you drop this lever to turn the machine OFF, it would bounce with gravity and bounce itself back on. This is not a third world country. These machines are located in Newburyport Massachusetts.

I was a lot younger back then, but to this day that is how helicopter engine are made. Those antiquated tools are more important to the major aerospace companies than any operator they've ever had.

Because the original design, the one you claim was "inspired by" your work was in actuality significantly different than the examples you showed. If it had actually been similar I would agree with you. But it wasn't. I'm sure to you it looked very similar but to the rest of us they were clearly different patterns and designs. I'm sure it must be very tempting to look at a square or a triangle and think that such a pattern must have been "inspired" by the triangles and squares you made, but how else do you build one of these without making little geometric shapes? Maybe selfish was too strong of a word. Maybe pretentious is a better fit, since you obviously drink your own Kool-Aid and aren't just being malicious.

Consider another item, like a car wheel. Do you think that every 5 spoke wheel looks the same? Is every 5 spoke wheel inspired by the very first 5 spoke wheel ever produced? Should the first maker of a 5 spoke wheel get license fees from every 5 spoke wheel that came afterwards? No.

But the surprising thing to me, is you could have taken the glory here. But you threw it in their face. You could have had a piece of art that was publicly "inspired by Victoia Balva". Most artists are flattered to have their work inspire others. They don't usually see it as a missed revenue opportunity like you do. And when they get what they want, they usually go home happy. You didn't do any of that. You tried to force them to commission you, pay you license fees, and when they decided to just stop being inspired by you that also wasn't good enough. The ONLY way to make you happy here would have been to keep the "inspired" design and pay you to use it.

I guess it's not surprising that I can't get any of you lonely neckbeards to participate in any discussion that has to do with kids.

This affects nearly 75% of K-12 students in USA.

60 million students teachers and parents. Basically 75% of school children in the USA. But I can't get any attention on the subject.

I characterize capitalists as folks who consistently and enthusiastically put the needs of an organization before the needs of people. You can call them businessmen if you like. My personal favorite is bootlicker.

> Sadly, four months of my professional life were taken away. The case has not been fully resolved.

I'll do the OP a favor and put aside the fact that the two glass domes are completely different, and that you can't put copyright on circles and squares.

That out of the way, it really seems like this is all selfish by Victoria. You saw a design, thought you owned the pattern and likeness to that pattern (you don't), and tried to strong arm the developer into either commissioning the work from you, licensing the design from you, or just throwing it all out and starting over.

They picked "throw it all out and start over" route because who wants to be strong armed by you for no reason, and you're still butthurt by it. Obviously you have no case, or else you would have done something about the 4 months of suffering you claim you had (chose) to go through. The fact that you didn't win a civil case for your losses is pretty damning for your narrative here.

"Look at how streamlined our organization is. We have no infrastructure to manage!" -IT Director with 206 different contract renewal dates.

I just say "no". And if they ask why because "I don't want to." The truth is; I move around a lot and I probably called in on my mobile anyway. But I don't owe anyone a reason. Capitalists tend to have unhealthy wordviews around selfishness and entitlement and expectations on other people. I don't participate in that.

I value my cognitive capacity. Finding the email, joining, adjusting my environment, approving all the prompts, sideloading the app.... just no. Don't be pretentious. My time is valuable.

Get me to the page with a phone number and lets make this easy. Then I can go about my day and we can have this conversation at the same time.

My cat was ill this past weekend but recovered. Then I saw the article you mention and it started me thinking. I've only fed my cat Friskies wet cat food recently. I think I'm going to try to stick with the seafood flavors for a while.

I was thinking the other day about the longevity of useless data. One idea that floated around in my head was self expiring emails.

I recently deleted about 40,000 emails. Most of them were identical, duplicate marketing emails. I was forced to do this to free up storage.

That's when I realized something. I am paying my email provider for the full price for every byte of "represented" data. In reality, their distributed file systems could compress an arbitrary number of copies of these emails and only consume the amount of space that one email consumes. So 100,000 duplicate emails on the server are consolidated into one representation of the data, but each customer has to pay for each byte that is represented.

The vendor stores a file once and charge full price every time they reproduce it for someone. If you have 10,000 copies of a file they only have to store it once but you will pay for every byte in all 10,000 copies.

Human's can transfer up to 39 bit/s during normal speech, so I highly doubt that it's accurate to describe human "throughput" as being only 10 bit/s.

https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-hav...

I agree that enabling stupid people to keep being stupid is just kicking the can down the road. However I think we should blame identity providers, not passwords and not users. Passwords work when the identity provider doesn't have ALL of them, and users shouldn't be expected to be trustworthy.

We just consolidated everybody's login into one platform. One monolithic database that contains the PII of EVERYONE.... What could present a bigger, better target than that? It's literally too good to pass up. Previously an attacker would have to compromise half a dozen vendors in order to completely pwn someone. Now they just need access to one.

Additionally, password managers are dangerous. Not a single one or them has been able to go more than 12 months without reporting a significant hack. Just another consolidated attack vector.

Like VPN providers. Why would I scourge the internet to gather browsing history of a target when the user has already consolidated that information into once place for me?

Dishwasher; Will contaminate each dish a predictable amount, consistently. A tiny amount on each dish that correlates to about 3% of the surface area of each dish sitting in the rack for a couple of hours. So the max contaminant is n% of [surface area of each dish] per wash cycle.

Silverware Bin; Will contaminate each utensil a predictable amount per unit of time, consistently, up until a saturation point where the utensile cannot contain any more contamination. So the max amount of contaminant is 1x[surface area of utensil].

Meat and veggies; Will be contaminated based on the amount of surface area in contact with plastic, and the amount of time time they spend in contact with plastic. So the max amount of contaminant is [surface area of food touching plastic]x[duration of exposure]. An important note, the food is usually refrigerated. Heat is what releases many of the chemicals from the plastic.

A cooking utensile will contaminate food a highly variable amount based on; The amount of surface area that touches the food, how long the utensile touches the food, the temperature of the food, the fat content of the food, the temperature of the cookware/utensile, the age and quality of the utensile, and a slew of other factors.

Additionally, we both have to deal with the three things you brought up. We all have dishwashers, and plastic bins, and plastic packaging. But you are ALSO using plastic utensils. So you invariably will have more chemicals from plastic than me, despite any other factors.

I don't think you understand. It sounds like you think I'm talking about defending youself against a human. I am not.

If a drone is trying to gain access to your home, do you have the right to defend against it using deadly force? Meaning; Force that would be deadly to a human attacker.

It's not hype. The FDA regularly issues guidance on "how much plastic" they allow in our food. I know someone who works in a lab that measures the chemicals transferred in such conditions. The results from his lab are used to certify food processing equipment.

Basically, all plastic has chemicals that, given enough time, will leech into your food and cause contamination. The question is; how much do we tolerate as a society while still enjoying the cost and convenience of plastic?

For me, I try to minimize plastic contact as much as possible. I only use metal utensils. I also use cast iron or stainless steel cookware with no coatings (other than seasoning the cast iron).

1) https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=does+pl...

2) https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/packagin...

I wonder where the threshold is for claiming self defense against a drone? Does the Castle Doctrine apply to non-human assailants?

Here's the link to the PDF; https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-408083A1.pdf

> In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well...

You mean like Skunkworks when they designed the SR-71?

Or DARPA with Atlas?

Or the DoD with the global GPS network?

Or the NSA's ANT catalogue?

Yeah, the government has never had any issues outpacing the private sector. You only ever find out about it when they want you to. Usually that happens 5 to 30 years after the market has already caught up.

> It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

Can someone explain to me how he made the jump from "we achieved a meaninful threshold in quantum computing performance" to "The multiverse is probably real."