just_steve_h

Well, they’re certainly developing cars that kill and maim pedestrians, disperse clouds of microplastics, and contribute excess CO2 to our atmosphere…

You know “Ghostship” was the name of an incredible East Bay artists’ community that was destroyed in a fire which killed multiple people. Is this really the name you’re going with? It’s not ancient history, either - less than 10 years.

Perhaps you slept through the year leading up to the 2024 election, when Democrats sent riot police into student protests? They arrested thousands, and were plenty violent. Democratic president & governor & mayor (NYC and LA and Boston, for example).

Or perhaps you missed the Occupy movement which was violently disrupted on a national scale with coordinated raids across the country, organized through the “Fusion Centers” (FBI + DHS + State & Local law enforcement)?

Anyhow, my point here is that organized violence against leftist protestors is a fully bipartisan policy, and has been for more than 100 years.

NY Times reporter Ryan Mac has the receipts on the AI generated commentary that defended the KKK alongside an opinion article in the LA Times. LAT has removed the comment and disabled the AI feature for now.

Even weirder… Coristine’s grandfather was a turncoat KGB spy.

https://www.jacobsilverman.com/p/prominent-doge-staffer-is-g...

THIS is what your “disruptive” heroes have bought & paid for. Yes, I’m talking specifically about paulg and his buddies in the VC world, who’ve stepped up their funding & lobbying to levels matching folks like Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaifie. They’re on an ideological vendetta to DESTROY functioning government and leave themselves with near-dictatorial private power, unconstrained by governments anywhere.

These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate.

This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for.

May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.

Ten thousand EV batteries packed into a ship’s hull.

What could go wrong?

R. A. Fisher developed many of the foundational techniques of modern statistics in an attempt to support his odious beliefs in “racial hierarchy.”

There is much to learn from considering this reality, but most will dismiss it as irrelevant.

I find Schneier to be one of the most cogent observers and commentators on the influence of technology and corporate organization on our society. His writing is compelling.

Agree with others that I’m left wanting for solutions to the challenges he so clearly articulates.

I find this essay to be well-crafted and compelling.

And of course, he fit right in around here…

Mortgage interest is tax deductible, for one thing.

U.S. military has some Very Secret Stuff happening in certain desert areas.

I love this! Reminds me of the campus network at Harvard. Around 1994-95 we had multiple zones, but only spotty understanding of networks by most users. I had a blast one day mocking up what looked like a Mac on-screen error message which said “Sorry, this Document could not be printed,” which I then printed on randomly-chosen printers across the University. Good times!

YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME

This is a widely under-appreciated fact!

I’m afraid the NSA regularly funnels information to the FBI and other domestic policing entities, and this has been widely documented [1]. The government even deigned to declassify proceedings from their special secret (!) court that decry the practice where NSA gives illegally-obtained surveillance to the FBI, which then manufactures a reason to go after someone using a technique known as “parallel construction,” concealing the surveillance source(s).

[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...

I have a shell alias so I can just type pb to do pbpaste|pbcopy - easiest way I’ve found to strip formatting and get plain text.

Gee, I’m so glad that I “opted in” to have my private medical data used for corporate research!

How did I “opt in”? My healthcare provider migrated to Epic for all medical records. I had the “choice” of… not receiving healthcare, I guess? But even then, all my past records were imported to Epic anyway.

And before you “market choice” folks start squawking: your provider changing their records system is not a “qualifying event,” so you don’t get to shop for another provider until the next enrollment period. Also, ALL of the providers available to me use Epic.

two comments above this one?

Am I the only one disappointed to find that www.mulchme.com isn’t a site by the authors? (It redirects to a natural-fiber playground material supplier.)

This is pretty big. Not only did Crow buy the house & then Thomas failed to disclose the sale (which he is obligated to do)… Crow also made a huge donation to Ginni Thomas’s organization, out of which Ginni received a fat salary.

Anyone close to the US security establishment recognizes the widespread abuse of the classification system. It becomes the default stance, to slap a “SECRET” designation on something. Just like how, in the old days, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” today we nights say “nobody ever got reprimanded for classifying documents.”

When the classification system balloons like this, inevitably the number of people with access rises as well. And, the seriousness with which they regard classification plummets.

This is extreme. Really extreme. This is about one-third of Fort Lauderdale’ as average ANNUAL rainfall, coming in about 8 hours.

SF Muni has reported on at least a dozen instances where a transit vehicle has been blocked from proceeding by a driverless vehicle. That’s only “surprisingly little” if one had expected widespread chaos.

Our world we be so much better if the people responsible for mega projects actually thought this way! But, I suspect that a person needs to have a certain hubris to believe themselves worthy of heading a huge project, and that this belief militates against seeking input from outsiders that might catch mistakes.

Silent disco parties are fun, and occupy an interesting social niche— you are around other people, having a shared experience, BUT you are each wearing headphones and therefore presumably not speaking to one another. Of course, you’ll end up having opportunities to talk before and after, but this guaranteed time isolated-but-together can be a nice bridge for people who experience some degree of social anxiety.

Here in Cambridge, MA, a friend used to host silent disco parties by bringing a small low-power FM transmitter connected to his audio playback device. He’d hand out small FM receivers & headphones, but people could also bring their own (in those days, most portable audio systems included an FM radio receiver).

Ray Kurzweil has a long-standing interest in Harold Cohen, and is at least partially responsible for the creation of the Windows software version of AARON.

How do I know this? I worked for Ray 25 years ago & helped promote AARON. Our ancient & untouched 2001 website remains available today at https://www.kurzweilcyberart.com/

The author Paolo Bacigalupi has a great sci-fi story set in the Gulf Coast of the near future, centering on a teenage boy who works as the titular Ship Breaker [1].

Even though it is technically “young adult” fiction, I found plenty to enjoy for this middle-aged reader.

His novel The Water Knife is also excellent and more “grown up.”

[1] https://windupstories.com/books/ship-breaker/

Everyone acts like all these wonders arise from private innovation. They discount the decades of public investment that brought us to the point that a company could develop a specific mRNA vaccine. From the public roads and public education to the trillions spent over the past 50 years to bring computer and bio technologies to their current point, it’s public investment that makes it all possible.

Our capitalist system works by private investors capturing most of the value of public investment. The dreaded Chomsky points out that the US socializes the risk and privatizes the profit.

But, here I am, talking trash about pirates in a barroom on the Barbary Coast! Let me stop before I lose a limb…