In the 70s in SF my father had his car window broken by someone who wanted to steal his parking space. He found his car pushed in front of an adjacent driveway, and ticketed.
$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).
And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.
The F-35 is absolutely synonymous with our entire airforce through 2088.
The F-22 is still a viable Air Superiority Fighter but there's about 100 of them. It cannot hold back a peer air force. The primary point of the F-35 was a cheaper F-22 that we could build 3000 of.
4th gen fighters like the F-18 cannot compete in an air war with a large amount of stealth fighters using modern long range missiles, like China is fielding. They would be defeated before even seeing a blip on their radars.
Without the power of Air Superiority, all the rest of our air force is basically useless. B2s and B21s might still be usable, but they cannot maintain a strategic bombing campaign on their own. The money spent on 4th gen missile trucks is pointless.
Giving up the F-35 is equivalent to total abandonment of our "Best Air Force" doctrine and would require a significant shakeup of how we view the military, and billions poured into other parts of the military to make up for giving up the sky. It also means capitulating to China in advance. Though, if we are willing to do that, we could save like half the military budget every year.
Just have to abandon the entire pacific, Japan, and South Korea, and the Philippines, and Australia, and Vietnam, etc etc etc.
California SB 2, signed by Gavin Newsome in 2021, removed Qualified Immunity as a defense for all lawsuits brought under the Tom Bane Civil Rights Act.
I'm not a lawyer, and I have never lived in California so I don't know how much that covers. The QI removal I knew best was Colorado (CO's law also made individual LEO's have to pay with their own money, up to certain limits), and was doing some googling which listed California and New Mexico.
I think the only one lying here is Gwern for calling the NYT liars. Gwern's claim is that by discussing someone's vape-induced injury in an article about flavored nicotine vaping, NYT misleads, because they are different vape product lines. The implication is that there cannot be an honest reason to mention the injury in this context. I disagree (as does the injured teenager, according to her quote in the article). I think it could also be understood as explaining that teens who enter the vaping market by way of flavored nicotine also have more exposure to the illegal products that caused the injury.
Gwern's evidence that NYT succeeded in their deception campaign is... riled-up internet commentators in the comments section who think vaping is evil. Which doesn't mean much because [pardon my cheekiness here] a) every comments section on every article everywhere on the internet is full of riled-up people, and b) we all know no one reads the article before commenting, therefore these outraged commentators must have developed their opinions without the aid of the NYT.
What do you mean delivery tech? Your delivery tech is a cargo ship. We're not talking about an ICBM that requires sophisticated re-entry materials. We are talking about a crude gun-device like Hiroshima, which is actually pretty easy if you google it.
Hopefully, this comes as no more of a spoiler than revealing the Titanic sinks at the end of the movie... but, everything Mark Klein revealed in 2006 (and that Snowden revealed in 2014) is still happening daily - along with much, much worse. And just this week congress is acting to further extend the secret extra-expanded FISA powers we don't even know about.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee and obviously can't reveal the details but has been clear it's gotten very, very bad (starting from 'worse than Snowden'). And Wyden doesn't strike me as the excitable type prone to exaggeration. So... I've concluded I should imagine the worst possible surveillance abuses and assume it's even worse.
He randomly let me interview him for a doc 10 or so years ago as a young filmmaker. Super nice guy. Just let me stroll into his office and chat on camera for an hour as a nobody, all because I wanted to talk about net neutrality and other issues
A true man-of-the-people, a rare find in a world of "statesmen" and "robber barons" running everything.
I hope that Oregon can continue to elect people like him when he's gone. We really are a more free state than the rest of them (see our state constitution protecting rights to profanity up to allowing being topless in public legally, as just one tiny example)
This does not work if your communication enpoint is the same as your encryption endpoint.
Or you don't control your key material.
Or your tech supply chain.
Or leave your device unattended.
Or aren't susceptible to the same "five dollar wrench" attacks used by certain in-person Bitcoin wallet thievestgat are also available to state actors.
You may never be able to completely protect yourself, but you can make an attack much more costly. For example, I use Heads with a hardware key to defend myself from an Evil Maid.
You raise an excellent point. I'd only counter that a number of the factors I raised are manipulated to retain mass surveillance even in the presence of mass encryption. Let's start with manipulating random number generators or controlling elliptic curve constants...
There's more info about the outcome in [1]. Long story short, the US government passed a law (whilst this case was being litigated) that let AT&T off the hook.
While I was upset to hear how that ended, it's also unfair to expect a company to refuse when the government shows up with guns, takes over a part of your offices, and tells you to stay out of their way and never tell anyone what they are doing or else you'll be killed or sent to a secret torture prison for the rest of your life.
That's not a situation that's supposed to happen in a free country, but here we are. If you're handed a gag order by the federal government and can't even tell your lawyers about what happened what options does a company have? How many CEOs and low level employees should we expect to volunteer to have their lives destroyed by refusing to cooperate with the government's illegal surveillance schemes?
At&t may not have been coerced quite that aggressively, but these kinds of problems need to be addressed by people other than the private companies who are themselves victims of government oppression. Having said that, not every company is a totally unwilling participant either. There are companies who are happy to make a lot of money by selling our private data to the government. ISPs and phone companies even bill police departments for things like wiretaps and access to online portals where they can collect customer's data. State surveillance (legal or otherwise) shouldn't be allowed to become a revenue stream for private corporations. In fact it should be costly.
Considering the massively disproportionate amount of influence corporations have over our government (mostly as a result of their own bribes) it's tempting to want to make compliance so costly to companies that they're compelled to try to use some of that influence to stop or limit domestic surveillance by the state, but honestly I doubt that even they have enough power to stop it. Snowden showed us that even congress doesn't have the power to regulate these agencies. The head of the NSA, under oath, lied right to their faces by denying that their illegal wiretapping scheme even existed. You can't regulate something you aren't allowed to know exists. He also faced zero consequences for those lies which tells us that he's basically untouchable.
Obama was elected on campaign promises that he would end the NSA's domestic surveillance programs. Obama was an expert on constitutional law and taught courses on it at the University of Chicago. He spoke out passionately about how unconstitutional and dangerous such programs were. After he was elected his stance quickly changed. He not only started publicly praising the NSA, he actually expanded their surveillance powers. Maybe the NSA showed him a bunch of top secret evidence that scared him enough to make him willing to accept the dangers of their surveillance despite knowing the risks and unconstitutionality. Maybe the NSA strong-armed him. Either way, not even the US president had the power to stop the NSA. It's pretty unreasonable to expect that AT&T would.
There's a reason J. Edgar Hoover held power for 48 years.
Kennedy wanted to "break the CIA into a thousand pieces"[1] and had a trusted brother as Attorney General to help with the task. And we learn 70 years later that Oswald was a CIA asset[2]. It's enough for even a President to sit up and take notice.
> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
Seems like your advocacy of the devil still supports the parent comment’s speculation of this being a cultural revolution appealing to workers who have been “left behind” (e.g. coal miners who didn’t learn how to code).
The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.
I think that is the Nixon effect followed up my the messaged opinion of the Regan administration that the government shouldn't be trusted despite doing 1000s of things that should earn a little bit of trust.
If you're the type of person who checks the comments on a post with this kind of headline, then you probably also want to (re-)watch the 2 minute highlight reel of Mark's backyard meat-smoking party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBxTEoseZak
His doors were unlocked the whole time...
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