The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies. It is the fault of local and national governments in failure to maintain services and failure to actually meet the costs of having a society. In the end, the price will be paid, but it has been paid through mental health.

Enough is enough. The sheer incompetence of successive administrations is a disgrace and a dishonour to this nation. The government should pay the bill for having a functional society, not create a pit of despair and then blame corporations for society jumping in. This is nobody's responsibility beyond Number 10.

Sometimes it is the right and appropriate thing to do, but I'd hardly call it "first response". The Snowdrop Petition circulated after Dunblane, but not Hungerford. It took the repeated failure of government to actually do anything useful that caused society to demand a ban.

After the Traveller threre-day festival in a farmer's field, the UK government tried to ban going places for a common purpose. A man claiming to be the reincarnation of King Arthur sued on the grounds that he couldn't join up with his knights if that was illegal. The UK courts determined that he was vastly more credible and overturned the ban.

In the 1950s, when the government restricted freedom of movement, the Mass Kinder Trespass forced a right to roam act.

In short, we don't give a damn what the government wants, and never have. We know our rights and defend, whether that means increased freedom or introducing bans. The rules are decided by the public, the government has really no say in the matter and never has had.

There's a problem with that -- it fools those whose opinions are irrelevant, but masks the presence of those whose actions are extremely relevant.

There is absolutely nothing easier than hiding in a group of nutters. With surveillance for the last 50 or so years being mostly remote and passive, that's all they need to do. As long as the signal-to-noise ratio is poor for those trying to maintain secrecy, but exceptionally good for those trying to steal those secrets, then such efforts are counterproductive.

The F-117 and B2 were so well-known to just about everyone that model kits of it were being sold in stores for 20-25 years before Congress were officially told of it existing. Why? Because the only thing the lies achieved was a total inability to detect that detailed plans were circulating amongst the public. By the time acknowledgement existed, the source of the leaks was so well-hidden by time that we will never discover how Airfix and other modelling companies were able to get the blueprints.

A glorious achievement of lies this was not. No, if you'd wanted to hide the program, then the USG needed to make this boring. The more boring and mundane the better. Make it such an utter snoozefest that the spies and nerds would stand out like a sore thumb, not be totally drowned out by the crowd.

The first problem is signal to noise ratio.

That sort of disinformation ramps up the noise fast. The signal then merely needs to look indistinguishable from the noise. It is so so much easier to hide out amongst freaks, geeks, and weirdos. Even Johnny English could hide out in such a crowd and not remotely stand out.

Nononono. If you want to pick out the signal, you need to reduce the noise in both quantity and volume. The signal then has nowhere to hide.

The second problem is the advertising.

What does it really require to monitor an aircraft? Active RADAR? No. Passive RADAR using civilian radio transmissions would be undetectable and can be done in post-processing as long as you have a good enough recording that's adequately timestamped and location stamped. And if it's stealth? Then detect it by the shadow. A marked dip in cosmic rays coming in from a narrow point where your passive RADAR shows nothing wouldn't be hard.

Throw in thermal cameras and you've got the temperature of the engines. Recordings through diffraction gratings will tell you what molecules are in the exhaust.

And what's needed to do all this? Well, as long as you record the data at the site and process it offline at someplace like GCHQ or the equivalent in other nations, then it requires very little on site. A motor home would likely be big enough to lug around what you need to do the recording side and who the hell is going to notice one motor home amongst a group of thirty?

No, advertising is a very poor way to do anything because you can potentially learn most of what matters both passively and remotely.

However, we have to factor in that we cannot evaluate the relative credibility of sources if ALL of the sources are outright dishonest.

Should we expect honesty from the MOD/DOD? If it is to cover their backsides due to wilful incompetency on their part, then we should require them to be honest, yes. They are in an extreme position of trust, where one wrong move could easily endanger the safety (and possibly lives) of everyone in their respective countries. These are not establishments where failure has any business being an option and face-saving exercies are not helpful.

But it gets worse. Those face-saving exercises have led to a slowly-building but now almost unstoppable wave of induced delusion, paranoia, and psychosis. This, in itself, is creating enormous dangers. During the COVID epidemic, it killed half a million in the US alone. The US life expectancy is plunging. Gun crime in the US is so bad that mass shootings have risen to between 2-3 a day. THAT is the consequence of a system that puts ego and vanity over and above trust and wellbeing.

The UFO case is a very minor piece of that jigsaw, but it is symptomatic of a completely degenerate philosophy where image matters more than anything else.

Although I absolutely agree with you, attempting to control the narrative on - well - just about everything is precisely what the USG has gotten into trouble over, pretty much every year since it was founded.

Although there is absolutely no evidence for aliens, it was important that this conclusion was reached organically by researchers. Paranoia and delusions of "secret knowledge" are the natural result of being told what to think, which means that you ideally want to avoid telling people what to think.

Governments and officials like to control power, information, and behaviour.

In practice, you can tightly control at most one of those. Try to dominate all three, and the other two usually decay into something dysfunctional and ultimately malignant. That is the price of over-centralising everything at once.

If the government had confined itself to power, and the Air Force to discipline and airspace, while allowing researchers to access and assess the evidence properly, we would likely have far fewer delusions and far less paranoia today. Yes, that would have required the Air Force to maintain secrecy through actual competence rather than narrative management, but that discipline would probably have done them a great deal of good. They might even be better able to distinguish fact from fiction now.

Which is how I teach. It is sound, logical, and promotes reasoned thinking and reasoned discussions. The enemy is rarely people, the true enemy is usually assumptions.

Well, most Americans weren't involved and didn't even agree with the "revolution".

What would be more honest to say is that America was founded in violence and needs to maintain that violence because it has never grown up.

The British emergency number had a bad IT upgrade, back in the 80s, which resulted in emergencies never getting displayed, only error messages.

I think it was in the 90s that an aircraft crashed because an airport monitoring computer was so infected by malware that it was unable to alert the crew or ATC that the aircraft had a serious issue and needed to abort the takeoff.

Recently, Oracle updated Birmingham UK's government IT system. It is no longer functional. At all. At a cost of hundreds of millions. The local government went effectively bankrupt.

I, honestly, DO NOT CARE that you cannot prove software "correct". We need IT lemon laws that make this kind of a botch-up very very very expensive for software vendors to mess up on. When something is mission-critical,

It might deter vendors from supplying government, but I'm not sure how that can be a bad thing. It is better to have an inefficient system than a new iand shiny broken one.

If you want to deinstall the app, blowing up the owner's house is not he way to do it.

This was stupid, reckless, does nothing for actually improving AI safety, risks worsening that very safety, risks OpenAI letting their systems being used on more and more extreme products (because all publicity is good publicity), and in short does the exact opposite of anything that anyone could possibly have imagined going through the mind of of this dweeb.

However, it is what we've come to expect from the Nu Society that is emerging - violent extremism, senseless violence, thoughtless acts, utter stupidity.

Welcome to the "brave" new world where nobody has any brains but plenty of explosives. Any claim America might have to rationality is degraded every time something pathetic like this takes place, and the rest of the world is honestly in no better shape even if it hasn't degraded to open violence yet. I am really not happy.

It can hallucinate all it wants and nobody will be able to tell the difference.

There is no left in America, they moved to the right.

The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.

If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.

Except none of that actually happened.

The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.