Dubious spying claims? Say it isn't so!

One wonders about how many thousands of stories there have been right here on slashdot about this or that bit of software, hardware or service supposedly wrecking democracy with its home phoning and data collection. But let the cost be less cut rate grey market hardware for the buying, and all such concerns become "dubious!"

If not for double standards, we'd have no standards at'll.

Ironic. A little while ago there was a big thread about dieselgate. All sorts of slashsnotters creaming over cases and fines for violations of big government regulations.

Now big government enforcing regulations is unwelcome when it comes to cut rate electronic junk...

Here is my surprised face :|

The right wing has always enjoyed stealing other people's stuff and giving it to their cronies. That's what they go into politics for, normally.

Sorry, there are still a few of us who actually go look at what is happening rather than just regurgitate what we're told. If that upsets you this might not be the web site for you.

The correct oxen must be gored, and the correct pockets must be filled with the correct amounts. It takes a long time for The Great and The Good to plan the feast.

Sure. And if the government cretins would forego a lawyer or two and instead hire an actual technician tasked to actually verify the performance of regulated products once or twice a decade, you'd actually have some means of keeping the business cretins under control. But time and time again, whether it's Madoff or dieselgate or Boeing, we find no functioning technicians anywhere in the whole, bloated clown show: just a bunch of lawyers covering asses and gleefully dancing through revolving doors.

Business cretins will be cretins. That is a metaphysical certitude. Even if you throw enough of them in a GULAG to cripple you're economy, the survivors will still be cretins. If you want compliance, the only hope you have is diligent regulators. When (not if) they fail, be sure your government-worship hasn't blinded you to their culpability.

Why would you want socialism? It has been tried in more than 100 countries by now, and every time it included concentration camps and related goodies (strictly speaking, there were close shaves like Grenada which had only disorganized killing -- but given that it lasted only 4 years in a nation with 100k people, two towns and a bunch of villages, I'll give it a pass). Also, every major brand of socialism: soviet, nazi, maoist -- includes a massive push for propaganda and social control. Are you going to suggest that current socialist countries (China, N. Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela, etc) don't use dark patterns and AI in their propaganda?

Capitalism's record isn't so stellar either, but at least it's not 100% bad and not so extreme. But then, the word "capitalism" is way too fuzzy to use in a serious discussion, we'd need to define it first. And the definition that was used the most, in countries that had dedicated universities of Marxism-Leninism and had mandatory lectures in all other university departments, was "capitalism = every economist system other than communism, including those that don't use money at all (like early kibbutzim), but excluding cavemen ("primitive communism")".

The other major definition is free market. But those billionaires you've spoken of are not so keen for free market, they prefer corporatism.

Thus: your post about capitalism vs socialism deserves to be at -1 not +4, as it brings no valid contribution to the discussion.

One example is AlphaFold an AI program which predicts folded protein structures "with near experimental accuracy" from amino acid base sequences. This ability is going to have a huge impact on many practical problems like pharmaceutical development, agricultural science, and engineering custom proteins. For example, since the human genome has been long since sequenced, the program means we now, with a fairly high degree of certainty, know what all the protein coding sequences make.

I'd say that's a pretty significant result.

If you work in technology long enough, you see this over and over. Every time something new comes along, it's actual usefulness gets buried in the breathless media response by a mountain of bullshit. But that doesn't mean the uses aren't real.

I had no concern with Joe Biden being Catholic, but I *would* think something was fishy with the *Electoral College* if six of the last nine presidents were Catholic given that fewer than one in five Americans are Catholic.

I'm not saying Catholics (or Jews) shouldn't serve on the Supreme Court, although maybe it would be good idea to have some justices who weren't Catholic or Jewish. Maybe an atheist, or polytheist.

One of the casualties of the Internet has been newspaper science desks. In the post Sputnik era, major city newspapers built teams of reporters with science and technology backgrounds to cover breaking science stories. To make use of that manpower in between big stories, they'd do a weekly science supplement, which was one of my favorite parts to read. These bureaus even had people on staff who could cover breaking news in *mathematics*.

That's all gone now, and you can see the impact of that in the scientifically ignorant summary you are objecting to. Twenty years ago, no major city newspaper would ever print anything that stupid. Today just the New York Times and Washington Post still have a newspaper science desk, and those are much reduced. Smaller newspapers barely cover local government anymore, they tend to just reprint opinion, purchased content, and press releases by politicians and corporations, and dueling reading letters on hot button issues. Actual shoe leather find out the facts journalism is in steep decline. In other words cheap content is more profitable, and science reporting is the least profitable content of all. The most widely consumed remaining sources of science information are non-profit -- the public broadcasting outlets.

Coincidentally I just ran into this somewhere else:

https://arendt.substack.com/p/...

The leadership thinks its 1990 - that our economy is fabulous, our soaring stock market is not the latest bubble, our military is dominant, our budget deficit is manageable. The citizenry thinks we still live in a democracy and that voting for either wing of the Uniparty is a meaningful activity. They think they still have the rights to free speech, to peaceful protest, to Habeus Corpus, to a fair trial instead of being declared a terrorist and deported. Large segments of the population still think the media, especially the internet media, is not exclusively a propaganda, surveillance, and censorship machine. The majority of the public thinks China and Russia are our enemy. The stock market thinks AI is worth trillions of dollars, and employers think AI will allow them to lay off massive number of workers. Business leadership thinks climate change isn’t real, fracking isn’t past its peak, and its environmental destruction is minimal.

It took an immense amount of reality distortion to produce the current delusional state. And that took an immense amount of money. The money came from the financialization of America. First they bought the media, which allowed them to manipulate elections. Then they used the officials they elected to pass the laws they wanted . . .

The MSM groupthink has gotten pretty thick on SlashDot the last few years, hasn't it? Once upon a time this site could be relied on for interesting and insightful posts citing some of the most interesting and/or authoritative sites on the Net, but that's mostly gone now.

What they wanted, and they were fairly open about it, was to Balkanize the country into smaller easily-controlled fiefdoms in order to better loot its industrial and natural resources. They set up the banking system specifically to aid and promote the "privatization" of the state controlled industries into the hands of their hand-picked soon-to-be oligarchs, IIRC Richard Armitrage was deeply involved in that whole process, which should tell you a bit about its goals.

I'm sorry, but what? Ukraine has been targeting almost exclusively civilians and housing within Russia since they can't penetrate the AD around most of the military sites. Hell, they're singling out farmers driving combines and municipal buses and then posting the videos on Telegram.

As I've been saying for three years, there are no "good guys" in that fight, just bad and worse.

I'm not implying anything. I'm saying the Pope's opinion is particularly significant to more than half the Supreme Court. They won't necessarily take those words as marching orders; I doubt that they would even agree that all the other Catholics on the court are good Catholics. But it means those words are automatically more weighty than if, say the Dalai Lama or the Lubavitcher Rebbe said them.