In the blue States it's generally individual cops getting caught doing it. Albeit a lot but still individual cops.

In the red States it's coming down from the top that's the difference. It's because corruption at the top is more common in a red state than a blue state.

This is to be expected if you understand how left and right wing politics work.

In a red State you have a right Wing state. So you have people that are prone to hierarchical structures and obedience.

That's going to encourage corruption because the people at the top will view themselves as being absolutely in charge and the people beneath them will encourage that view. It's why Trump can get away with committing so many crimes and the public still loves him.

A hierarchical command structure versus a democratic command structure is going to lend itself to top down corruption more often and the corruption is going to be worse. There is just no getting away from that or the consequences of right-wing politics.

Are actively hiding their economic data. We are going to have a 1930s style economic collapse.

All the pieces are here. We are in the middle of a industrial revolution with massive amounts of automation and technological unemployment without any significant new employment opportunities on the horizon. Seriously sit down and write out what the jobs are going to be after automation and ai and machine learning rip through the economy. You can't just go and make cars after the buggy whip factory shuts down when the car factory is also automated.

Next we have a huge economic bubble where we are spending trillions of dollars specifically AI infrastructure spending and the massive bank loans that go with it.

And we have widespread drought resulting in crop failures and increasing food prices. Even if you don't believe climate change and the water cycle breaking is the problem the drought is still real.

This is everything that led up to world war I at world war II.

We have the technology to stop this but we don't have the education and critical thinking and social structures to stop it...

Seriously. I understand the bomb squad needs robots that's a good thing. But every year a crime goes down and every year we put more cops with better weapons and more weapons on the street.

I understand what's going on with all that immigration enforcement bullshit. There's a bunch of bitter old assholes who get off on seeing people slammed into the ground.

But is there really that many people for whom the pleasure of watching a couple of Mexicans get dragged into a black van by masked goons is enough to make them A-Okay with this bullshit?

I just had to get the new fancy license and they made me take my glasses off because they're using facial recognition now.

One of the funny things I keep seeing over and over again is confused white people in the middle class pulled over by cops and harassed the same way they're used to seeing "those people" harassed.

The place where it's really showing up is DUIs. In several red states with heavy duty police enforcement there is a ton of stories about people getting pulled over and arrested and losing their license when they were Stone Cold sober. There are a couple of big scandals where the local police were just told you need to get your arrest numbers up or else.

DUI is really popular for that because the cops can arrest you without cause or proof and it takes months before it comes out that you were innocent. Meanwhile your license is suspended.

The fact that they're doing this to the in group is a massive red flag. It's a huge shift in how things work.

I don't think any security services are daft enough to have actual backdoors now. They just look for vulnerabilities and then keep quiet about them.

So I'd be more worried about the mass bricking US made routers, world-wide. Do it as a false flag, pretending to be some teenage hacker. Give their own tech a nice boost too.

They are objectively bad for the economy and they know it. People are starting to know it too no matter how much propaganda there is.

Google it. It is a fact that the Republican party is worse for the economy than the Democratic party. Trickle down economics doesn't work and never has.

We have been trained to get angry when we see anyone discussing the two political parties. So it's tough to have this discussion but it's a discussion we need to have.

Because without positive economic gains for 90% of us the Republican party has to give voters some reason to vote for them.

Yes homophobia and racism and transphobia will always be good old standbys but religion is fading in America. It's just not bringing the numbers in that it used to.

So they are pivoting to crackpottery with anti-vax being the big one.

It's occasional mass outages for a short time, vs more frequent small outages and security issues.

Don't forget that Cloudflare handles a lot of the security for sites that use it. Not just DDOS protection, but things like user authentication and HTTPS.

I mean it matters, not that there is good competition. Cloudflare is rather dominant.

In this case centralization isn't a bad idea. Okay, occasionally there is a problem, but when there is a massive amount of resources are thrown at it, and it gets fixed quickly. Meanwhile their software is updated and constantly tested, so it's more secure and stable than most in-house efforts. It's their full time job, where as it's usually just the IT guy's background task when the company manages it themselves.

What matters is that there is still competition, to keep the market working properly, and that such services are properly regulated.

The only laptops I'd consider to have even half decent security are Lenovo ones, and of course Lenovo is a Chinese company.

Siri has been one of the weakest assistants for many years now, and given that they usually just ship half finished software (Apple Maps comes to mind), I'm surprised they were able to resist. Maybe there is another reason, like it kills the battery.

It's interesting that there seems to be more paranoia over fears that the Chinese government may possibly have backdoors in network gear, than there is over US companies that we know for a fact have NSA backdoors in their network gear.

Your job probably has a lot of weak passwords. Humans can remember a small handful of semi-decent ones. Password managers are the way to go.

It's a grift, taking advantage of a grieving person's desire for it not to be so final, for there to be hope of seeing their loved one again.

They all have cloud sync too, and in a pinch you can look up the password on your phone and type it in.

I get not bothering when it's a throwaway account, using the built in password manager is usually the path of least resistance.

I don't think it's just that people are bad at passwords, it's that they don't care. If their account gets compromised, it will probably hurt the service provider more than it will hurt them.

Gen Z are particularly sensitive to this, because they have noticed that most of the advice they get is bunk. If they are told to protect something like a password, they are more likely to evaluate if it actually matters to them to protect it, rather than just blindly following the advice.

That said it's a little surprising that password managers aren't having a bigger effect. All the major browsers offer to create and remember strong passwords for you.