151 karma · joined October 17, 2018
Misdirection and decoys. How much use are those sensors if they're all detecting you at the same time?
If they become prevalent enough, I could imagine the development of "scent bombs" that would spew out so much of your odor that the sensors for miles around would all detect "you."
Modern day Russia propaganda isn't about trying to convince Americans to take a Russia's POV or have a favorable view of it. It's about sowing generalized discord, mistrust, and internal conflict to weaken the US as a whole. Anything that inflames divisions is useful to that goal, even "trigger the libs" memeing.
> ... they learn and then leave, because if you were able to pay them the market rate you would've not been training them in the first place (considering the context of your comment).
As an employer, you're going to have to pay market rate for the skills you need, one way or another.
If you do that and your employees still want to quit after their training, then your organization has more dysfunctions that you need to fix.
Do you have any links to books or articles that go into this idea in more depth? It definitely feels true, especially in how oversimplified economic theories are presented to laymen.
Don't you mean guided missiles and torpedoes?
The whole unmanned weapon concept is much older than toy quadcopters.
> We see China and Russia unfettered by this old boy network that are allowing their brains unfettered freedom to make modern stuff.
What? Are you familiar with the terms "oligarch" and "guanxi"?
> Empower all, with online voting of all eligible voters
Online voting is a bad idea. It's far more easily and cheaply subverted than most paper-based analog voting systems.
I don't think so, my guess is that it was due to one of the comments prior to the one you mentioned, or some activity that occurred on the same IP IBM was using.
It might not even cost the county tax assessors much, some of these abuses are so blatant that even a private citizen could buy out the building under that policy:
https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/14/apple-hq-200-dollars-sant...
> Apple, history’s first trillion-dollar company, is arguing that a cluster of new buildings at its headquarters is worth only $200 in order to lower its tax burden.
> The trillion-dollar tech giant claimed in an appeal the value of the “cluster of properties” is worth $200, not the $1 billion value given by the Santa Clara County’s tax assessor — elected officials who determine property value for tax purposes.
I'd call it "disruptive innovation" to buy out Apple's headquarters buildings for the $200 it thinks they're worth, rent them back to Apple at the maximum price the market will bear, and pay Santa Clara County it's fair share in taxes.
> I tried to book a trip to the airport for my inlaws using both my account and my wife's account. She rarely uses Uber, and hers showed a 10-15% cheaper rate. Do they think we're stupid? They targetted 'smart' people for using ride sharing as opposed to taxis, and now they try to play us.
> Let's not even get started about dark UX patterns. It's hard to see peak rates now, and unless you get a bad gut feeling, you wouldn't know you're currently paying more than a cab rate.
> ...
> The same ride I used to pay $8 for is sometimes $25-32 now. Let's be honest, if anything better came along, I wouldn't look back.
The world now is rediscovering the valid motivations for the old taxicab regulations that so many were claiming were holding "innovation" back.
Uber's prices were so low mainly because they were using VC money to try bankrupt traditional taxi companies. Once the subsidies run out, Uber will probably at least as expensive as traditional cabs, if not more so, but with consumer-hostile pricing tricks that were once illegal.
If people know you have Bitcoin, they can just beat the wallet password out of you and throw you in jail just the same.
I guess it still needs to be litigated, but the question on my mind is: Does that right of refusal only apply to the model, or also the data that trained it. If it applies to the data, the regulation is pretty useless, since anyone could avoid the deletion requirements by training models on it, if it doesn't I think the use in the model takes care of itself. At some point they'll need to retrain, and then you're data won't be there.
And their appealing product will probably get shut down or rendered unrecognizable, either by FAANG or by bankruptcy. I've pretty much sworn off all startups that sell services, products dependent on services, or anything that requires "the cloud."
At some point, my data's going to be sold off and monetized, and I won't even be able to enjoy the product I was supposed to get in return.
> was true at the time but surely what people care about is data flowing between the medical app and existing Google services?
I would think people would care about the data flowing to any Google service. An understanding that it only applied to existing services like you're claiming would be meaningless. A hyperbolic example of this is Google/Deepmind would still be compliant if they came out with a brand new service, Google Privacy Destroyer 1.0, that puts all these people's private health data up for sale on the dark web.
That's just wrong. For one, VOA/RFA/etc. aren't "banned" and it's hard to believe how they could be without active jamming. They're were just forbidden to direct their broadcasts at American audiences. The concern was that the government should not be in the business of competing with existing American media organizations. If there was any concern about the content of the broadcasts, it appears to have stemmed from the idea that the State Department, which used to run it, had too many communists in it.
My sense is that analog methods are the best response to authoritarian regimes; and the best way to prepare for the advent of one is to familiarize yourself with analog spy trade-craft (and analog response to digital spying, like disguise).
Speaking of which, does anyone have any non-fiction book recommendations about analog spycraft and responses to authoritarianism? Things like how to do dead drops, samizdat, clandestine distribution of literature and the like?
Censorship is always possible. You can make it more expensive, but the censoring regime could just decide to bear the cost.
The PRC government may decide that China has developed enough that they no longer need to provide any access to the worldwide internet to their general population. They could switch the Great Firewall to default-deny mode, and only whitelist the minimum number of services they need to keep their economy running. I think that list is much smaller than a lot of people would assume, given the domestic coercive power of the Chinese state and willingness of foreign businesses to bend to its rules.
But I'd say that's mainly because they don't know or don't truly understand the situation. The reason for that is that literally billions of dollars are spent on advertising that papers over human rights issues by blasting competing messages about luxury, fashion, desirability, economy, etc. A passive consumer isn't going to be able to overcome the environment of information asymmetry that's actively maintained by wealthy corporations.
Then there's also the issue of how the race to the bottom also actively destroys most ethical alternatives, which just turns understanding into despair over the lack of ethical options.
I think if you put the half-price, slave-made product and a double-priced, ethically made alternative next to each other in a store, I think consumers would chose the latter if they were both sold under signs that clearly communicated the realities of the lives of the workers that made them. That's not going to happen because the incentives are for the company that mistreats its workers is to lie and cheat, so I don't think the market can solve this issue. It's going to require sustained intervention by ethical governments to fix the incentives in favor of human rights.
At this point, the singularity is speculative fiction.
I read somewhere that some real supercomputer systems programmers actually use toy clusters of Raspberry Pi's to test their scheduling software. It helps speed up their development cycle because they can do initial testing on their desktops.
Edit: I think this is what I was thinking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78H-4KqVvrg
> A stressful job even to read propaganda afterall.
Yeah, I've been told these news anchors are expected to not make a single mistake in their speech or presentation during the broadcasts, and that they're timed so precisely that you could set your watch by them.
I'm glad Americans have other, independent news sources. The problem with state-controlled media is not so much that it exists, but that when it does other options are often suppressed or eliminated in its favor.
> Quick question: in this hypothetical where China presents an existential threat to the US, what happens to the Chinese economy when they invade the largest consumer of their domestically produced goods and services?
WWII was not bad for the US economy. The car plants were converted to build tanks and airplanes, then they were converted back when the war was over.
I don't think China poses an existential military threat to the US itself in the medium term, but it does pose one to Taiwan and potentially some other countries in the region. Unfortunately, the main thing that contains that threat and maintains peace is US military superiority.
I've never done internationalization, but I'm surprised language could be such a barrier. Couldn't you just hire a team of translators on a contract basis?
Maybe theres's some market for internationalization-as-a-service.
Maybe at the toppest-top, but it's a struggle for anyone with even a high normal-range income to buy a home in the Bay Area.
Jammers are trackable, but if you use them judiciously, I think they could be used to cover other attacks: activate jammer, attack camera infrastructure, deactivate jammer, and flee.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-friends/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-friends/ffgfcbf...
You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.
Why do you have so much certainty? What evidence can you provide that they use or currently plan to use these techniques domestically for widespread tracking?