ta_egdhs

yes. any set of complete functions form a vector space and can be used in a linear sum to appropriate other functions in the same space. the dot product tells you the value of the coefficients. The fourier transform is just a special case of this.

I think you missed my point when I said "the terrorist didn't win but we certainly lost".

Everything you say about how we've lost our identity, optimism, and freedom is exactly what I meant by "we certainly lost". I agree with that 100%.

But none of these things were the goal of al quida. AQ doesn't win by virtue of what we've lost. AQ doesn't care that we turn ourselves into a police state. "They hate our freedoms" is a propaganda line we told ourselves. The goal of AQ was to end the rule of secular governments on the Arabian peninsula (namely the Saudi's) and they attacked the US precisely because we prop up the Saudi's. 17 years later we're still backing the Saudi's. Bin Laden is dead. An order of magnitude more death has been unleashed in the Muslim world than what was released on America on 9/11. 9/11 was ultimately massively counterproductive to the goals of AQ. The terrorists didn't win.

idk why this is downvoted. the 90s is the period between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror. its the only time in living memory where there was no enemy.

9/11 absolutely changed the country. it was the start of militarized police, nationalistic displays, and 24/7 fear that have all been normalized today. Perhaps the terrorists didn't win (Bin Laden is dead and the house of Saud still stands) but we certainly lost.

>gouge visitors

>save $50 on a hotel

how the hell can you simultaneously be gouged and save money?

what makes the long term resident more deserving than the short term visitor? why should the rootless pay a subsidy to the rooted?

Quit trying to make this into a culture war thing. America is generally pretty swell even if youre not an older white guy. Just don't be poor.

if the gov has to physically send someone with guns to someones door to enforce a law, the economic feasibility of enforcing the law has already shifted massively away from the passive data scoop of a mass surveillance system. Why hasnt the gov won the war on drugs by just busting down every door?

iirc the stasi employed half the population to report on the other half of the population. Thats a lot of wasted money and labor. It simply isn't a sustainable system.

Chinas social credit is a perfect example of what I mean. technology is making it more and more practical to actually enforce restrictions on civil liberties down to the granular level.

"if amazon doesn't fuck people over someone else will"

yeah i said that.

"so who cares"

no i didn't say that.

I said the best defense isnt the benevolence of corporations willing to say no to gov contracts on principal. the best defense is a populace able to subvert these technological systems of oppression. For facial recognition this means adversarial patches. for Internet censorship this means VPNs. in other cases it means encryption and cryptocurrency.

what I'm saying is we should assume that whatever mass surveillance mechanisms the government is trying to buy, it will eventually buy and whatever legal safeguards there are to protect us will eventually fail.

what I'm calling for is the individual to be "armed" with adversarial patches or whatever other tool it is that confounds facial recognition sytems. the only thing which is long term effective is a population which can and does resist. VPNs, encryption, cryptocurrency, and a bunch of other tech (existing and under research) will be the safeguard when all else fails.

constitutional rights (and a culture that enshrines them as sacred) is just one layer of protection for civil liberties. The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical. For better or worse this is the logic used by gun advocates, but it should also apply to other areas.

technology can make it feasible to scale repression like never before. facial recognition, big data, centralized Electronic banking are all enormously powerful tools in the wrong hands. the guns of the 21st century are those made by the subversive cypherpunk. cryptocurrency and encrypted chat come to mind. In China the number one tool to oppose state censorship is not protest, its a vpn.

at the end of the day if amazon doesn't do this someone else will. so long as the tech is possible the gov will get their hands on it, and so far as the tech errodes civil liberties it eventually will be used to do so.

Amazon can only hold back the tide for so long.

I don't get the creepy vibe the author is claiming. looks like mundane office posters of the period to me.

that doesn't solve the problem it just offloads it.

wikipedia could collapse under the weight of being the internets authority of epistemology.

/r/neoliberal has a fantastic slogan/soundbite for you to use.

"legalize housing"

a people ideologically against government intervention should be all for removing government barriers to building what you want where you want. that includes corner stores and town houses. they naturally should be against the gov telling you how much setback you need and how tall you can build.

don't phrase it as we need to zone for corner stores. phrase it as we need to legalize corner stores.

you can recurse in excel. its disabled by default but you can set the max depth on circular references in some menu. I haven't used it since the 2007 version

As the conventional wisdom states, China is the future. There will come a time when us Westerners will need VPNs as well.

see this is the difference between being a skeptic and a contrarian. The contrarian will call everything wrong and sometimes by pure happenstance they have a point. The opaqueness of google is immaterial given the same source decries a dozen things everyday as fake (irrespective of if its true)