What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

Don’t get me wrong, removed the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

Biggest /s possible.

I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.

I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.

Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.

I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.

US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.

Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?

This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.

Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.

Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.

Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.

I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with removed bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really removed and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.

Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.

Standard procedure to reduce copycat killings and be respectful to the families of the victims killed on stream. Imagine why people in the US might want a hypothetical livestream by the Sandy Hook shooter of them shooting a bunch of kids taken down.

I’d argue that even if you waste everything from hunting deer, in most areas of the US fact their is now one less deer is definite ecological benefit all on its own.

A forest with a large deer population where people don’t landscape and fence every tree is going to become either a near monoculture with the only exceptions being invasive species. This is because deer eat most but not all native saplings before they can grow to the point they can survive a deer attack, and with most forests in the US having far, far higher populations than natural we get far fewer native trees than natural.

Normally anything like modern deer levels would have led to a population explosion of predators to keep them in check, but because most deer predators are far more vulnerable to human presence, activity, and historical control efforts than deer, which thrive in human dominated areas, the result has been significant damage to forests.

As such, anything like hunting that can lower the deer population back towards natural is very enthical as it doing far more to protect the forest than any number of newly planted saplings could ever do. Your mileage may very, all forests arn’t the same, check the ecology of your local forest before hunting to figure out what the forest needs more of and what it need less of, etc…

Yep, we’re all gonna die.

Not because the robots planned it mind you, but just because some lobbyist sold a few Congressional members on the military needing AI enhanced weapons, and we couldn’t be behind China when it came to the LLM powered ICBM race now could we.

As a Fedora user I can confirm that this seems about right.

I regret that I have to be the one to inform everyone of this, but I fear MajorHavoc suffered an unfortunate accident caused by a computer glitch in an elevator control system three hours ago. They will be missed.

Crontab dnf update -y and trust that if anything breaks uptime monitoing/ someone will let me know sooner or later.

Yes, you could technically use email like SMS, while the standard allows for up to five days for the message to go through that’s pretty rare, in practice it’s primarily used to send long messages from one computer to another, not a single sentence or two between phones.

In practice, it is about as secure as SMS, as both require similar levels of dedicated effort to interpret. Most of the actors with the hardware used to intercept and decrypt SMS are the same actors who can compromise a server, or outright have acess to the backdoor they paid 10 million to put in RSA. Not that they need it, as the largest email providers by far do often work with law enforcement anyway. Both SMS and email attacks are seen at about the same rate and scales, which is to say rarely outside of government agencies where both are unfortunately routine.

Signal is primarily designed and marketed to fufill the same basic role as SMS, as evident from just how much of an afterthought anything but the mobile app is, how said app copies the same format as SMS for messages, how it required an phone number to use and sync phone contacts, and how it did support SMS for quite some time. It is emently reasonable for Signal to have continued to have featured the messaging format most of the people it could talk with used.

Why is email less bad than SMS? It’s about as (in)secure.

Email also fulfills a different role, as it is for longer, more formal, and less time sensitive messages. Nevertheless, more modern and technical encrypted email clients go out of their way to still work with unencrypted messages insteand of being deliberately incompatible as Signal is.

SMS is also the common standard for talking to people.

For the vast, vast majority of people, the technical security of, ‘hey, you want to catch a movie next saturday’, is far less important then the message actually getting through.

Qute simply, it is far more important for a communication method to be easy and universal then to be secure against attacks the vast majority of people do not think they will ever encounter. When most people want to tell their neighbor two houses down that the dog has gotten out again being able use the app they already use to communicate is far more important to them then then a bunch of technical jargon about end to end encryption.

Perhaps, but definitely something to worry about after net zero. Dams, especially existing ones, tend to cause local damage to a handful of species, while the natural gas they take off the grid damages nearly all of the ecosystems on the planet while killing people even in normal operation.

Why does it matter why they were built? Low carbon energy is low carbon energy, while some countries may have an natural advantage it typically tends to be in places with lower options for solar.