bitcoins are highly trackable; most activities that can convert large sums of crypto to spendable cash are typically trackable. At least by nation state actors.

The norm right now and they way they get away is people say - "Oh Salt Typhoon, nothing more we can do than have the ambassador send a pointed but respectful letter" is in China.

If instead we just had some human intelligent asset, kill some of those operators, things might actually change. They could also escalate of course, but then that is really just acknowledging we are in a real conflict rather than letting our enemies bleed us and gather all the intel they'd like.

For private enterprise I'll agree you might we right that private enterprise paying ransoms emboldens criminals, and encorages more of the same. I don't agree people should be told they can't pay. It is not *MY* responsibility to fall on my sword suffer the destruction of my enterprise because law enforcement / national defense can't or won't do what is needed to protect me. Kinda like I have a dead bolt on my door, someone could still kick it in. I rely on the local sheriff to create an environment where few criminals would be so bold.

Everyone needs to pick up a Koran and read those sword verses at the very least.

Islam isn't just a religion it is also a political system and it hell bent on conquest. We are at war with Islam, it is wholly incompatible with western culture. Islam does not make any room for pluralism, unless subjugation of people 'of the book' counts and you are alright with death for everyone else.

That is what the text says, there ain't any getting around it. Anyone who especially if they claim to be islamic either actually isn't, or is lying to you (something the Koran also tells them to do).

Anyone professing to be a follower of Islam fundamentally can't be trusted, full stop! We need a Muslim ban, or the very instant they think they have the numbers, our culture, our freedoms, our very lives, will be lost!

None of it matters unless the threat actors believe there is no degree of pain to severe they could inflict that would make governments chose to pay.

These are at least in some cases foreign state sponsored actors - there is no reason to think say that when attacking hospital / public health administration, that some number of people literally dying because care can't be manage is 'a problem' for them.

So all no ransom payment policies do unless they are truly absolute is make the threat actors so their are serious first. Just like resisting ransom payments in kidnapping results in a few severed fingers or an ear in the dead drop.

I don't think society has the stomach for an absolute under no circumstances, even if that billion dollar power plan will be permanently disabled as a resulting in local industry will be crippled for years, we won't pay policy. It just does not relfect real world needs. Better to pay the ransom and make a big show of then following the money and running down the people responsible, taking kenetic action against them. Like when you find the guy the CIA/MI6 or whatever takes care of them with a car-bomb, or you have the air-force stike their yacht in Caribbean. What will stop these guys is making it clear they will be treated as terrorist-combatants and doing this shit will have them looking over their shoulder for the rest of their lives, and force them into hiding, because if found they will be killed, no trials, no plea bargins, just BANG

Would he actually be more comfortable with our Elected non-tech elites making the big decisions?

I just don't see our legislative process, or administrative state terribly equipped to deal with shaping AI technology.

I think their job is to:
1) Ensure societies existing guard rails are uniformly and fairly applied to all, independent as to if AI has anything to do with the activity or not.
2) Respond reactively. If we identify a specific activity when coupled with AI is in some way corrosive to the society we generally want to have, then enact legislation to curb it in that area. While generally speaking anticipating problems and trying to avoid them is good practice, with something like this evolving this rapidly, I believe you usually create more issues if you go trying to solve problems you don't really know you yet have.

A good example is work force reduction, a lot of people are convinced there is going to be a huge wave of job losses that are directly attributed to AI, we don't really have any evidence of that yet. There are plenty of equally plausible explanations for unemployment rate increases right now. So if you go legislation a bunch of 'things' companies are not allowed to use ML/AI tech for and it turns out the UE uptick isn't ai related all you have done is limited productivity gains and created more economic drag.

It is important to keep in mind this is mostly just computers filling out paper work, taking down orders, and churning out questionable quality music and video clips. Hardly things we can't 'shut off' if need be. It isn't like nearly as destructive and irreversible as all kinds of development projects we often give the private sector a long leash to run with.

The entire EU is a protectionist bloc Canada is protectionist coffee. Tariffs are wonderful, useful tools when other countries use them. But when Trump does them they're bad. As are so many other policies like deporting illegal aliens. Obama and Biden did more and entire states and cities did not rebelv and nullify federal authority like it was fort Sumter 1865. Pure TDS.

All that is to say central planning has historically proven to be less than efficent and continues to do so.

It is still a huge leap to suggest they are on the brink of economic collapse. For example man us cities have pretty acute housing shortage / affordability crisis, would you claim the US economy is on the brink of collapse based on that? or even those cities and regions?

As to EVs so they over produced them.. Does it matter, if the government subsides pay for it, and they don't create system problems by slowing or halting future production, which they don't have to because the government can just subsidize retolling those factories to do something else to consume the inputs, it does not have to domino or snowball the way capital destruction often does in market economies. - Sure it will be drag on the economy over all, because the inefficiency and waste will have to be made up for with taxes etc, but then our government manages to light a lot of money on fire doing stupid projects that nobody needs or cares about too, as well as fighting foreign wars.

China built a bunch of cars nobody will drive and apartment blocks few will occupy. Its not good economics but the idea it is ruinous seems farcical; at least on the surface without real numbers to back it up and the CCP will never make real numbers availible. I say all this as someone who thinks the best thing that could happen to the world would be the collapse of the CCP but hope and wishful thinking does not make it so.

Modern Russia is absolutely socialist. Heck they national healthcare baked into their constitution.

It may also be 'autocratic' in practice if not form but it absolutely is socialist.

It needed to be "fixed" but not necessarily on anyone's time table besides the ffmepg volunteers, or alternatively given it is an issue with specific coded and not the core of the encoder or something, it is up to people that build and ship ffmpeg with they projects to disable that codec and rebuild and push an update.

If Google is paying or providing support infrastructure, hosting, etc they don't get a say in feature / fix priority. Just because 'security' gets added to the strings that constitute a bug report in a FOSS application should not suddenly mean that it becomes the most critical task, nor should it place some obligation on the authors to provide a fix at all.

The FOSS projects really need to learn to respond with "Look this is a hobby, and as a craftsman I take pride in my work, and i am trying to write clean, secure, correct code. However my priorities features and fixes that I care most about and other contributors sending high quality pulls care about, and those might not be yours, even if you think it they impact security. If you want determine how we spend our time directly, many of us are willing accept contract work."

FOSS projects need to reject this notion that just because a cabal of mostly commercial ISVs slap a CVE on something, they owe the world a patch even if it means losing sleep or skipping their camping trip to work on hobby they did not plan to make time for that month or three!

I've noticed this kind of thing a LOT lately. Evidently this book is out called Nudge that tells its readers to annoy the shit out of their customers until they 'install the app". Because evidently running in the background and draining your battery constantly harvesting your data and monitoring your location is more profitable than actually selling the service.

I booked air tickets on a website and it was deliberately irritating, pausing for a long time between screens, showing a QR code and saying, 'tired of waiting? our app is much faster!" Hell, even Youtube is unwatchable without a Google account and giving them your real name, address, phone number for 2FA, email, backup email to cross-check databases. And once you've done all that. the jack-in-the-box pops open and it's like, let's get your social, your tax return info for last year, last three places of employment, and then upload a photo of yourself holding your ID. And your selfie cam photo wasn't clear, our facial recognition can't read it. Nice try scammer, your application has been denied. We'll be keeping the info you already entered, though.

China is like this, an entirely real-name internet. You can't so much as order food delivery without all of this. Simply entering the country requires facial scan and fingerprints.

1984 was a warning, not a role model.

... was how to disable it.

Savages? What? Excuse me? Racist much? Hey, could you give us your opinion on people from India? Or tasmanian aboriginies? Or the Jews? Enlighten us! Once upon a time you'd be at -1 flamebait. But I guess it's true if you don't kick out the natzees your bar becomes a natzee bar, too. And while you're at it tell us about slt right hero and Googler James Damore, too. Go read his famous anti diversity screed again, you'd love it.

Adsense payments dropped off a cliff. This is why so many websites are laying off staff. Google wants all traffic to stay on its site. Gemini AI (yes, the one that, when asked to draw Scottish people, drew only Blacks and then asked to draw a group of diverse people also drew only Blacks.

What do you need to click through to a website for? Those can contain dangerous information like warning people not to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That disease is still out there and still dangerous. Get your boosters, everyone!

Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

Contemporary home-school does not look like it did decades ago.

We home-school and from what I can tell from the homeschooling community is that like us most of the kids participate in one or more co-ops that where groups of parents collaborate to deliver a course that are more hands on like science and music. Local YMCAs, gyms etc, offer classes during the day like Home School PE.

So homeschoolers get quite a lot of repeated and consistent interactions with other children. How 'diverse' those others are probably varies a lot by the size and makeup of where you live.