Jamesbeam

Oh no, a CIA operative being a dishonest man? I am shocked, I say, shocked.

They do all the dirty work and get paid in pennies. What do you guys expect?

Personally, I am ok if they steal 40 mil from the government on their way out, instead of brokering a nuclear arms deal or letting themselves get paid to train a private militia in some shithole for a local warlord.

The commander in chief just gave 14 million to his golf club buddy renovating the reflecting pool without even giving other companies the chance to get that contract.

He siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money into companies where he or his family is personally invested, but this guy gets all the outrage, even though it’s clear that trusting someone with a few hundred kilos of more or less anonymous currency means he must have done a pretty good job warranting that kind of trust.

DON'T LOOK UP!!

Unfortunately, the character traits that make you an excellent CIA operative are the same you need to be an excellent criminal, it’s expected that you need to pull on their leash from time to time so they remember who is in charge. And that they will try out how far they can go before you choke ‘em out.

This is really a lot of peoples fault. How can you be a CIA operative without them having checked your background extensively? Why did he become one in the first place, after inflating his resume and showing that he is willing to lie the CIA in the face.

And the same guys being responsible for these kind of security clearance checks are probably still with the CIA and have recruited dozens of other potential problems out of negligence. If you do this on purpose, it’s kinda treasony.

Weaponized incompetence should carry a lengthy prison sentence for government employees.

Also, there are more than a dozen people with exorbitant salaries that are tasked to keep them in check, unfortunately, they also know how to manipulate those people, so once in a while someone slips through the cracks.

This is a story that should not exist in the first place because everyone involved did their job properly.

Fun part of being an Engineer is actually inventing stuff.

But we understand the world better than anyone before us, most big breakthroughs have been made, and in a lot of engineering fields we reach the limits of what is possible with the resources we have at our disposal.

So our lifetime is an age of refinement, and a lot of the engineers understand this, and how the world works, and are fine with getting large amounts of money for being more or less ok with being lazy and just solving problems to refine already available tech.

For a long time, engineers had the carrot.

Now the computer has the carrot, and it dangles the tasty promise of being able to invent new things out of thin air again in front of the engineers eyes. No more refinement, it’s eureka time, baby. AGI, the holy grail of engineering is upon us or so they say.

And engineers are now willing to pay handsomely from all the years of getting money thrown at you for doing boring refinement, for the illusion of being inventors again.

I think it’s kinda beautiful. Engineers refine the machine by sharing the only thing the machine can’t replicate by itself to teach it to solve problems better than them, so they become obsolete.

This is like watching the dinosaurs talking about the water temperature while the giant extinction-level tsunami wave is slowly crawling to landfall.

Everyone has a different way to deal with reality. I think all the events of the past few years just let more people realize how the world really is, they use the way of expression available to them to make sense of it, and society definitely had a vibe shift.

We are fighting for resources again, when did that ever go well in the last 2000 years for everyone? It is what it is.

No, because they want to know why this happened, and if they had a chance to prevent it, and getting shot by the IRCG is just the consequence of doing what someone else expected of them.

Go out and protest and I will bring you freedom and peace and prosperity. That was the promise these kids counted on. They paid for those lies in blood.

That blood is on the president’s hands just as much as it is on the hands of the IRCG commanders giving the orders and their henchmen pulling the trigger and you can bet every family who lost someone in this war knows that.

Glad the law doesn’t count for the King, otherwise he would be in trouble.

The president’s Autopen though is going into overdrive signing all the pardons for every American who actually took the 5k.

Whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and

Whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was wilful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

- https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/597

I wouldn’t put too much weight into this.

Some pattern with Cambridge researchers I noticed, they deliberately pick study populations that will give them a more likely preferable outcome to their research and think nobody notices.

Look at the study population.

> mean age = 45.9 years; age range = 18–81 years). This sample was recruited to be representative of the population of the United States on the characteristics of gender, age, and race. Participants were paid $3 for a 15-minute study.

See how they picked gender, race, and age, instead of also diversifying by level of education.

That’s not an oversight,it’s part of the study design to create preferable outcomes to then generate more funds for their research with the attention they get from publishing.

Most people 45 and above will not have any education at all about AI. So a large part of the study population has no reference or internal tooling in their brains that allows them to recognise patterns used in LLMs in the first place.

On top of that, they only had 15 minutes of time and got 3$ for it.

What kind of study population do you think a 3$ reward attracts?

And I am not saying these people are stupid, but I say if you sell 15 minutes of your lifetime for 3$ , I highly doubt you have the funds and time to meaningfully educate yourself about AI and gather references about how AI uses language differently, because of how the technology is designed. But there are also a lot of people who do that will simply never join the study, because they have zero incentive to do so.

So, good for them they are able to trick the average HN Billionaire, but the study design is somehow flawed by not taking education into account.

May their funding never dry up from your taxes.

We don’t seem to live in the same universe.

The Iranian people will never come out to protest again in masses after how the US betrayed them.

The president said "help is on its way", live on TV, they hijacked radio and tv signals in Iran to broadcast it to as many people as possible.

The people of Iran went out and got slaughtered like cattle.

You think the mothers who lost their sons and daughters, be it us soldiers or Iranians, will just forget that their children died because of an illegal, unnecessary war that was planned by political idiots in a signal group?

Thousands of innocent souls died in this war because the US President is an idiot and a liar. The US citizens are held hostage just as much as the Iranian citizens. It’s not the people’s fault. It’s horrible leadership.

No help was sent, instead, the inability of the US army to end this war put the US into a position where the regime in Teheran will come out infinitely stronger than before the war. They indeed have "all the cards".

Khamenei is not threatening to end the Iranian civilisation and bombing drinking water facilities. It’s the aggressor, the United States of America. They are just missing the R before the US.

The best outcome for the rest of the world is not regime change in Iran. It’s regime change in Washington. Preferably non-violent.

You speak like you’ve done your research, made your mind up, and are confident in your conclusion. I respect that, and I would be stupid trying to convince you of something else, because you’re not wrong.

We have common ground and both agree that this is a baddie. I am happy with that.

The rest is just a difference in problem solving.

How do we deal with the baddie?

We both can put a steak on the grill and have awesome steak, even if we would call each other crazy for how the other one might do the grilling.

I am happy I don’t have to make the decision how we deal with the baddies. Something we probably can agree on as well. It’s always easy to mess with the coach if you’re just standing at the sideline with nothing to lose.

I throw punches, I can take some, cowboy.

>That necessitates some degree of competence and flexibility to work with potentially conflicting groups and individuals beyond "off with the heads of everyone who doesn't believe what I do" type ISIS crap.

Well, about that. I have not seen a single man sentenced to death after Islamic law for any of the crimes they committed last year. He might not pull the trigger himself any longer, doesn’t mean he’s less responsible for the ISIS shit happening under his reign.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/syrian-forces-massacr...

>If some half-baked Islamic fundamentalist theocracy crap is the price of local stability, that sounds pretty cheap to me, and it probably sounds even cheaper to the people who've had to live with the instability. If Europe has a problem with that in their back yard, they can whack him and they can own the quagmire.

Fair point. But at how many innocent souls do you draw the line?

I think it’s a bit more complicated.

There is a likely US scenario and a rest of the world scenario. It will be interesting to see if China acts on the overextension of the US Military in the Middle East. Taiwan will be a big play for both and crucial to the hyperscalers.

But since the US is dabbling in piracy again and telling people what they can do and not do with their shit, it’s not too far-fetched that everyone that is not a global superpower is at risk of getting bombed to smithereens if they are a danger to US AI supremacy.

This is such a crazy timeline, predicting even like a single year ahead feels like looking into a medieval glass ball.

But we are humans, I am confident we will find a way to fuck this up royally for everyone. Brace for impact.

Your whole handwritten Principles of AI document is a testament to failed leadership. That’s all it is.

The only reason someone needs to write this is because leadership is not smart enough to solve the problems it showcases, in a way that is respectful to how the employees with years of experience learned their craft.

They have a tried and tested thought pipeline that makes them capable of what you hired them for, and you try to introduce a magic eightball to that and then force them to research that whatever the statement that shows up on the ball is true before they relay it to someone else. It’s unnatural nonsense.

Ingenuity comes from that spark in your brain that happens when you really dig into something because you’re interested in it. A machine will never be capable of that. AI didn’t invent a single thing, it’s simply finding stuff in all the data the labs stole that is already there and humans overlooked.

Now you force people to start working with whatever the magic word generator put out and go from there. They have zero incentive for that, because those thoughts come out of a black box and are not their own.

I find it ethically troublesome you somehow see the need to force behavioral change down the employees’ throats because company leadership is collectively failing to address the core of why people paste AI into everything.

They have nothing but disrespect for the technology, because it makes their job harder and them as a person dumber and less satisfied with their work.

Hire an external company to do interviews with each employee about their use of AI in your company and how the way your company is using those tools annoys them. You’d be surprised what you find out, when people have no repercussions to fear and anonymity.

There is huge resistance if you see it necessary to write a document for the whole company that forces behavioural changes.

Sure, you can hit the dog until it does what you want, but if you do that long enough, you get your head bitten off.

You need to find out why people are doing all these things, and then fix them. No extra paperwork is needed.

He writes:

"If I’m trying to understand child development, I ask it to imagine a debate between Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. What would these two great psychologists say to each other about the problem I’m wrestling with?"

What the actual fuck. Even David Brooks suffers from AI psychosis.

He seriously believes these machines are thinking and could imagine a debate between two dead people. They cannot.

You cannot extrapolate consciousness of dead or living people from the training data or what people wrote about them.

So whatever the AI hallucinates about these people, David Brooks is going to take that as his base to understand child development and is then probably applying it to real children.

You do understand how nuts David Brooks is? Right?

Why would anyone listen to someone about AI who doesn’t understand how the technology works and where its limitations are?

You’d suspect someone teaching at Yale would notice that by himself, but nope. He goes on and on and probably used the same approach to produce this writing.

I understand why they do it.

Every pound that makes it to America has the potential to kill thousands of Americans.

But the way they try to solve this problem looks kinda dumb to me. This will just go as well as the three-week special operation in Iran.

The people they kill are innocent, until proven guilty in front of a court.

That is a core principle that we believe in if we are law-abiding citizens.

Those Fishermen never had the chance to defend themselves in front of a court. Their crime was being born in the wrong place. I find that not sufficient to sentence them to death.

Also you need to win the people over or they are going to fuck you. You don’t win the people over, you get Vietnam or Afghanistan.

How do you win the people over, if everyone in the village those fishermen lived in knows you murdered their friends? People who simply had no choice to say no to the cartels for the sake of their families, who are now widows and orphans.

Those poor Fishermen are really stuck between a rock and a hard place.

What is most likely going to happen now is, those widows will turn to the cartels who now offer them food and support.

Now those women say fuck the Americans. I will sit with my children on these drug boats until the day I die, to kill as many of them as possible. I am going to celebrate every American dying of an overdose. What do I have to lose? They already killed my husband, they can kill me as well.

And that’s how the cartels will get women and children on these boats, and now what? It’s checkmate.

A single video gets out how CIA covert operations kill innocent women and children on those boats, the cartels win.

Those attacks are nothing more than stupid PR stunts and the CIA using these poor souls as guinea pigs for their drone shenanigans.

It neither solves the cartels’ logistics nor the main problem. Americans fucking love their drugs.

And as long as there is a lucrative black market, there will be people supplying it.

A man cannot have fun any more these days.

Is allowing a man to generate corn circles to send conspiracy theorists on a wild goose chase through the UK for the weekend really too much to ask for?

I get you.

And you seem to be a decent person. I appreciate that you step up for the engineers and that you try to explain to me that humans are humans and humans make mistakes, and trust me, you are not the first person frustrated with how my brain works.

There is no argument to win here. This is just a matter of perspective.

Your concern is with the individual engineer and the personal consequences they, and if you sit in jail, also their friends and family will suffer from.

It’s also pretty clear from your examples. Your Good Samaritan views on things are noble, but they make you blind to simple causality.

You attribute the failure to disclose conditions that make you unfit for duty to a trust problem with a third party but that is not the case.

In reality, it’s a severe flaw of character.

If you risk the lives of hundreds or thousands in the case of the Airforce pilot because you’re unfit, then it is simply selfish.

It’s not the passengers fault, or the tower’s, or some Generals.

My concern on the other hand is with everyone else.

We can argue for days and not get any further.

I sent some mails and voiced my concerns. Let’s see if someone in charge of things like this will agree and have a closer look at what the kids in the AI labs do all day with their toys.

Thank you for the exchange and stay a decent person.

‎> Literally nothing in this post comes across as bragging. A PR fluff piece would not call Claude "unsophisticated”. PR fluff pieces do not admit to legal wrongdoing.

I disagree. You’re just not the right audience to see it. But I think it’s totally fine that we have a different opinion here and I don’t want to convince you that I am right, and you’re wrong, because you are not wrong, you simply have a different perspective.

> You want them... to put themselves in jail? I doubt you'd hold yourself to the same standard if you made a mistake.

Yes, that’s what I expect from you if you play at that level, because that is the standard of responsibility you need to handle this kind of power.

And yes, I pretty much hold myself to the same standard because I have a zero CIVCAS track record from my time in the military and I had power over life and death every single day.

With great power comes great responsibility is not just a Spiderman quote. If you fuck up this royally, you have to look for something you are good at that allows you to be in stoner code bro mode all day long, but you don’t belong at the frontline.

> If an airplane manufacturer makes a dumb mistake, do you put their engineers in jail? No.

Yeah, they do. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28276654 Headline could just as well be Bogus AI Engineer jailed over safety checks.

> You do not understand the psychological dynamics at play here in the slightest. You aren't even trying to understand. If the government was anywhere close to this punitive with the AI companies, they would simply stop disclosing, the end.

I think you don’t understand. All an engineer needs is a bit of sunlight, food, and a computer to work from. You don’t get to choose to stop disclosing if the military gets involved. You’re either doing what is asked of you or you are a national security risk. And you really don't want to be a national security risk.

No, its not just a dumb network configuration. They are not treating this with the seriousness it needs to be treated.

It’s a combination of a complete containment failure on top of the utter incompetence by the engineers to identify the breach and stop the product from doing cybercrime on the public, open internet. Heads need to roll for this.

I don’t care if it’s easy to miss. If you have a billion dollars and can’t offer a proper containment protocol, it’s not the problem of the public who has to suffer the full blow if your product goes on a rampage on the open internet for days. It’s not like this happened in a millisecond.

Instead, they go on a PR tour. Of course, the message is look what our product can do. Otherwise, they would have pushed for criminal charges against the people responsible for all of this by themselves. You do the crime, you do the time. The defence that the AI did it, is not going well in front of a court.

This is a good time to put one or two engineers behind bars to teach the rest that serious threats to the public have serious consequences, and you get charged like you did the crime yourself if the system you are responsible for starts doing illegal stuff.

What other precedent is set here otherwise? People in AI labs trying to play god are outside the law?

> This is how you get companies to stop disclosing. I don't think you realise how easy it is to just not notice things.

If you have technology this dangerous that it poses a threat to public safety, you need to stop using the technology until you can prove this won’t happen again. Then be put under strict supervision, everything needs to be logged, recorded and looked at.

If your toddler just almost burned down the house, do you give him another set of matches and hope for the best?

These companies have billions of dollars. Their product can hack into unsecured environments autonomously. They obviously have no clue what their product is doing, or a way to intervene when it starts connecting to the open internet and is going on a CRIME SPREE…unnoticed…for days.

Altman and Amodei give me stupid billionaire kid Alien Earth vibes. Let’s see how long it takes until they get eaten by their own creation.

Stupid kids playing with fire.

If you hacked one of those companies, the FBI would kick in your doors and you will have a pretty bad day. If AI companies do it, they get to use doing crime for marketing purposes? WTF?

And whoever designed their containment protocols should be living under a bridge effective immediately.

It’s the equivalent of a level 5 biocontainment lab leaving a glass tube in the staff kitchen unsupervised and hoping nobody thinks it’s an energy shot, before leaving home and infecting the rest of the planet. We all know what happened 28 days later.

This is usually the point where the military seizes your tech because you clearly showed you are incompetent in using a dual-use product safely and reliably.

The other option is regulation and actually putting engineers and the CEOs behind bars for life if this happens again.

These idiots, and I mean Altman and Amodei, walk around and use massive containment failures of a dangerous technology as marketing gimmicks.

Oh look, guys, our model has hacked into three companies, we are much better than openAI who only breached two companies with their inferior product, it sometimes adds girl schools to a target package, but be sure we trained it to not kill American children, yes we also sell for military use. Can I take your order?

Testing should only be allowed with on-premise data. You give the AI access to networking around the country, and those data centre locations have so many third parties that can and will fuck up that it’s simply impossible to have proper containment protocols outside military compounds.

It’s also like every journalist in the US is personally invested in AI somehow and simply doesn’t want to ask the important questions.

As the public, we have the right to see the containment protocols and where it all went wrong, but journalists collectively look like they got used to suck dick when it comes to AI.

Absolutely insane.

I am not the one being naive. We had a stable regime with Iran, a murderous regime, worthy of critique and diplomatic pressure and sanctions, but it was stable and predictable.

Iran was a lot more politically stable than, let’s say, North Korea, where the supreme leader had allegedly murdered his brother, who had zero interest in becoming the supreme leader, with poison at a public international airport. Better safe than sorry I guess.

Why do we allow North Korea to have nuclear weapons?

"The DIA director’s April 2026 testimony stated that North Korea’s missile tests ‘align with Pyongyang’s defence modernisation goals of improving deterrence against Washington through the development of a modern solid propellant missile force.’ North Korea has tested ballistic missiles in January, March, and April 2026."

Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1047...

I’d argue the DIA director telling Congress about North Korea preparing ballistic missiles to reach the United States with nuclear warheads is a clearer threat to the US than Iran just existing and dabbling in nuclear research besides terrorizing their own people.

We also have Israel, a nation of ,at least from my personal experiences, good people,run by warmongering far-right religious fanatics for a while now. Also having nuclear weapons, btw.

I would talk about the dirty nuclear deal Trump is pulling for the Saudis right now, but their crown prince allegedly got away with murder before, so I prefer to keep my limbs and will not challenge the man wielding the royal bonesaw.

If you think this will not end with Saudis having a nuclear weapons programme, you have more trust in the moral integrity of the president than I do.

Oh and btw, Donald Trump has the football. The sanest person to ever exist.

And you seriously think Iran having a nuclear weapon is a bigger problem than all the other maniacs having one?

I think Iranians are smart enough to create a nuclear weapon, but also smart enough to use it just like anyone else having access to nuclear weapons.

As a deterrent and bargaining chip for getting treated equally and not getting pushed around by the local far-right religious fanatics that currently threaten the whole region with disregard for the lives of anyone that is not an Israeli.

Remind me again, what’s the reason to still put American soldiers lives at risk this week?

Are the Iranians days away from having a nuclear bomb again and planning to use it on the US?

No?

It is "Help is on its way" Wednesday again after the casual TACO Tuesday?

That’s not it either?

Hmm, must be that Iran wants to annihilate Israel then with the nuclear bomb Bibi is saying they are basically three days away from for the past thirty years?

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

That’s not it?

Damn, must be some 4D chess, if the Doofus in Chief and the Secretary of Death are hiding their war goals from their own citizens and congress for months.

How about the Iran baddies taking control of the Strait of Hormuz?

That’s bad, right? Why did we allow them to dabble in piracy for all these years?

Oh, they did not before the three-day special operation led by the smartest commander in chief in history with an army run by loyalists instead of excellence, who have access to unlimited compute with the best LL models in the world and can’t finish a war with sand people if their lives depended on it?

Damn.

At least the president is a successful businessman. This war must have for sure been worth it if they keep putting American troops lives at risk. America first! The American people come out of this even more free and wealthy, right?

https://www.cfr.org/articles/was-it-worth-it-the-true-cost-o...

What a shitshow and you guys voted those idiots into office and power. What a shitshow.

I was wondering why Netflix was reinstating 30-day trials in some regions so suddenly.

They must be really desperate to artificially boost viewer numbers.

I am sorry guys, this will never be a safe technology, because it’s controlled by humans. We all know it. Some idiots will fuck it up for everyone else. Might as well be the idiots at openAI.

AI feels for me like SuperSoakers. SuperSoakers were the coolest thing ever.

They had so much power you could have a water fight across the whole yard with your friends, just a few minor rules and a pinch of common sense.

Aim centre mass, never for the head or balls, keep your distance, and the goal is having fun, not making war.

But some idiots had to aim for the eyes or balls, and nobody wanted a new pirate age, so SuperSoakers were nerfed in the one thing they were good at. Shooting water at impressive distances with impressive speed.

We have a collective track record of fucking things up for everyone else that spans generations. Fire, Engines, Nuclear etc.

The important question is, what makes you think we are not going to fuck this up too in a way everyone has to suffer from the consequences.

And for what, because a few idiots with deep pockets have ai psychosis?

> modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically.

‎> vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.

Feel free to click and zoom yourself through the generational pile of almost a quarter million dead Russians below, armchair general.

https://200.zona.media/

Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

How would dragging a bunch of executives into the street and tearing them apart actually help? It’s nonsense to go to jail for life or getting the dp because some corporate lackey does his job.

The executives are by design replaceable, even the CEO. OpenAI doesn’t suddenly die because someone murdered Scam Altman, or a bunch of old people sitting on the board of directors.

Their infrastructure is fair game, though. Which means boycotting the data centres to deny them the oxygen they need to survive. These companies are so full of investor money they need to grow, no data centres, no growth, company collapses when investors find out they got scammed hard.

And by going for their infrastructure, I don’t mean with molotovs or industrial cable cutters, I mean the old fashioned way. Find people in your city that want to shape its future for the better and organise. Then force the city council and mayor to pledge allegiance to the people instead of the machines. Once your city is guaranteed data Centre free, look for the next thing to improve.

It works, it’s violence-free, and the outcome is a lot better than spending life in jail.

Retaliation for exposing major character flaws of the chancellor’s cabinet and potentially corruptness of major CDU (Christian Democratic Union) figures close to the chancellor seems a plausible answer.

FoIA requests humiliated half of the chancellor’s cabinet this year, including the chancellor himself.

The agricultural minister (CSU)(CDUs sister party) was especially proud of his nickname "the black butcher".

Someone sent a request inquiring about the hygiene protocols of his butchers shop via FoIA and he rather closed shop to deny access to the protocols than hand them out. This is now in front of a court and the media made fun of him for being the black butcher without a butchery.

Digital Minister (CDU) went on TV and proudly announced no more fax machines in his ministry.

Someone sent his undersecretary a fax the same day with the title "Jäger des verlorenen Faxes" which translates into "hunter of the lost fax" and is a Hommage to the German Indiana Jones raiders of the last ark movie title.

Two weeks later the minister sat in an interview and said he needed to correct himself. If he sees another fax machine in his ministry it’s going to get thrown out.

There was a huge conference that is run annually by a company the culture minister (CDU) is controlling that allowed access to major German political figures including private talks, including the minister of economy (CDU), for a fixed price.

It was only uncovered by a FoIA request. It was so bad the Bavarian prime minister had to pull any funding and recommendations to the conference and had to stay away from it after going there for years.

Just this week the mayor of Berlin (CDU) had to give up his spot as top candidate in the upcoming mayoral race because he lied to the press and even lied repeatedly about phoning with the chancellor during the major attack on the energy infrastructure in Berlin by allegedly left-wing extremists.

A FoIA request busted the lying mayor as well as the lying chancellor, whose ministry couldn’t provide any proof they telephoned at all at the time they both said they had phoned, when a court asked them to deliver proof to the court.

This is only on the federal level, in a single year.

IFG/FoIA busted tons of lying and cheating local politicians over the years. Of course, the party that is involved in most of the heavy cases does want this law to die or be completely ineffective.

It’s very annoying for the chancellor that normal people have the right to inform themselves by whom and how decisions were made as soon as public money is involved.

But he’s also calling every German citizen lazy and cheating with sick days, etc., so I’d say the German people have a huge reason to distrust this cabinet and use the IFG/FoIA as the small man’s nuclear bomb, and the cabinet really doesn’t like that the peasants can fight back with the most annoying weapon in their arsenal, counter-bureaucracy.

The issue is a completely different one.

Ronaldo was getting his red card in the qualifying match. They overturned it in order for him to play the first match of the World Cup, but they didn't remove the penalty.

Qualifiers and World Cups themselves are completely individual tournaments with their own structure. So not everything from the qualifier carries over.

Balogun, on the other hand, is the first player since 1962 that doesn’t have to sit one out after a red card in the running tournament. Interestingly, the red card that was overturned in 1962 was also under public and presidential pressure.

The World Cup regulations themselves say on page 18/10.5.

If a player or team official is sent off as a result of a direct or indirect red card (second caution), they will automatically be suspended from their team’s subsequent match. In addition, further sanctions may be imposed.

There is no way in the ruleset to overturn this after the ref made his decision.

https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/636f5c9c6f29771f/original/FWC2...

The rules are the rules, but the peasant rules don’t count for the King of the free world apparently.

He did what he always does. He grabbed Infantino by the pussy and made a deal. What is even more concerning is that he damaged the whole US Soccer team with this.

They could have won without Balogun. The team is perfectly capable of doing that.

If the players or coach had any spine and self-respect, they would bench Balogun for the game nonetheless. What message does it deliver to the world if he plays?

If they win, the whole world will look at them like, “Yeah, whatever. The US president won that game for them, and however far they might go is not because they worked hard for years to get to that point but because the president had to involve himself.”

How do you expect any soccer fan to have respect for America or the national soccer team ever again after this?

The sad thing is, this president has a track record to ruin sports for the average Joe for a living.

Let’s not forget how he was responsible for thousands of fans not being able to enjoy the NBA outside Madison Square Garden because the King rolled into town and all public viewing within a huge security perimeter around the venue was cancelled on short notice, so the King could have a nap behind bullet proof glass.

Peter Thiel amuses me, the man is going for the full-length ride on the cannonball and is 200% committed.

Wait until he finds out that the space pope is a reptile.

Men like Thiel have shown up in history over and over again, we all know how it ends. Thiel is not worth anyone’s attention, really.

Laugh at the man if you see him, call him an idiot, and go on with your day.

Thiel will learn the hard way that power is a fragile concept and no human has managed to hold onto it forever. He can drink longevity llamapiss lemonade each day, won’t change a thing.

What you can read between the lines is far more interesting than the headline.

I am giving the NYT the credibility that they thoroughly check their sources, so the question is why would anyone from the US Government want this to be publicly available information?

It makes all involved parties look like idiots.

This report basically says that the us administration currently has terrible intelligence relationships with Israel, if they have not been informed officially as a direct strategic partner in the Iran war over the planned operation. It’s kinda important if your ally plans to blow up the people you negotiate your own peace deal with, don’t you think?

It also means that the "we don’t spy on allies", Americans, indeed spy on allies. I’m absolutely shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

How else do you get in possession of information that your war ally didn’t seem necessary to share, if not by spying?

It also says that Mossad/IDF leaks at the highest level because the assassination of government officials who are actively brokering a peace deal is a kind of very high-level decision.

Still, if this actually happened this way, it’s not a power play to make this public, it is dumb. But dumb is the signature move of the current US administration, so it makes the report even more believable.

Will be interesting to see how this develops.

I'm playing monsters in low-budget horror movies.

It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.

Have to give it to Cyber Command. This is cheap and effective propAIganda.

Of course, America is now the only nation on the planet with advanced weaponised AI models that are so good they beat billions of dollars and decades of IT security experience with some of the brightest minds in their fields within hours.

If this were true, you’d see the president yapping and bragging about it on Truth before the NSA director even gets a chance to publicly talk about it. Probably doing a live stream about how he personally prompts his way into an unconditional Iranian surrender. You know it, I know it.

Nice try, William, but unless I see the Senate Intelligence Committee freaking out with you sweating black goo like Giuliani, I ain’t believing it.

This is the same kind of bullshit that was showing a gun on TV that could apparently give people heart attacks with some frozen, untraceable darts.

If the US really was in possession of a technology that could hack into the most secure environments on the planet autonomously within hours, you would see all their partners pulling their access from shared IT systems and blocking all traffic coming from the US immediately.

Especially considering they have been caught spying on allies before:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how...

You know what they say in intelligence circles.

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, it's open windows season.

None of the partners or adversaries seem to give a fuck about Mythos, so there is a good chance this is just another lying NSA director as usual.

Come on, people. You don’t run the NSA if you’re an honest man. It’s a spy agency.

I don't feel offended the slightest, and I listen to critique. Also, I don't think you should change your tone.

I take an authentic human voice over AI-generated slop any day.

Thank you for spending valuable time out of your day to have a little argument with me.

We are two humans talking to each other so we should be able to make mistakes, and be misunderstood, and if we wanted to, yell at each other, and still wish each other a good day afterwards.

You're not my enemy because you come to a different conclusion than I do, and I don’t need to convince you of anything.

Yes, the US would win if they used tactical nuclear weapons on civilians in Iran like they did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The straight would be open, there would be no more resistance, and help is on its way would not be an empty promise.

Can't get murdered by the Iranian regime if you got murdered by the Trump regime. Technically, no more suffering. Practically, I hope we can agree that this is not a good solution to the problem the current US administration is trying to solve.

War in the end is just a different form of politics, it's an escalation ladder that is always won by the party who can one-up the other war party into submission.

Mutually assured nuclear destruction freezes the escalation ladder.

It's something both parties can't afford, and therefore, they consider solving their problem diplomatically, as it should be, instead of having an infinite stalemate while bleeding to death in human and other resources.

The thing with the 5% commitment is, I think we both can agree that yes, it's a kind of subsidy, the EU needs to do more on their own to be less reliant on American soldiers defending their freedom, and that the US taxpayer should not be paying for the defence of European countries is reasonable.

But the US bullying NATO into the 5% does not automatically translate into a stronger NATO.

And a strong NATO is also in the American interest because if Russia took over those countries, it would deny the US a market of 2 billion people to sell goods to .

So geostrategically, it makes zero sense what the current US administration is doing. The US needs the EU countries as much as the EU countries need the US.

https://archive.ph/nKL3g

NATO has so called STANAGs (Standard agreements) that make NATO forces interoperable. So smaller countries can pull the same weight in combat operations as their bigger neighbors.

Just throwing more money at the US defense industry to buy equipment is not translating into a better interoperability layer, which is the glue that holds NATO combat operations together.

An example. It's cool to have a bunch of F35a in Germany, great piece of technology, but if they get shot down by friendly fire because the interoperability layer between lets say polands airspace defense and Germanys Air force is not working properly, additional money is not going to help.

Had a good time with Germany winning their soccer match yesterday.

I appreciate the well wishes for my stay and likewise wish you only the best and thank you for the exchange.