The Biden Laptop censorship debacle wasn't the political hit job you think it was.
Yeah, it was WORSE.
It was a mistake, and it was rolled back as soon as it was realized that it was.
No, it was entirely deliberate, and every party involved knew exactly how much of a lie the "this is Russian disinformation" narrative was, but carefully kept the NY Post's well documented article from being seen (or even searchable!) until after the election. The FBI went to FB and TOLD them to suppress it - you couldn't even link to it in a private message. Twitter knew perfectly well that preventing people from seeing it by shutting down NYP's account was in keeping with the Biden campaign's desperate need to keep the information out of circulation in the weeks before the election.
Social Media companies saw the story as fitting well with the pattern of disinformation injected into their streams during the 2016 election to polarize the country, and responded accordingly.
No, they didn't. They saw a well-written article about material that had been confirmed as legitimate by multiple sources - including people corresponded with in material found on the laptop. The salacious crap highlighting Hunter Biden's idiotic lifestyle wasn't germane (other than we all pay the Secret Service to chase around and clean up after his messes), but the ample documentation of Joe Biden's direct involvement in influence peddling and the movement of millions of dollars of Chinese money into shared Biden accounts, that was (and very much still is) the real issue. And of course Joe Biden had just stood there in a debate and repeated his lie that he had absolutely no knowledge of his son's international entanglements, while his son's own words showed that Joe Biden was knowingly, deliberately lying - he was WELL aware of his son's dealings, personally enjoyed lots of cash from it, helped facilitate it while he was VP, and is very likely in criminal jeopardy from all of that.
All of that was plain from an even casual review of the material on the laptop that third parties (involved in their activities!) confirmed, with documentation. The FBI/DoJ knew that when they sent agents to Facebook to tell them to clamp down on it. Every other media outlet knew about it and - with only a few exceptions - acted in lock step to prevent the Biden family's substantial corruption from being know to voters when it mattered to know it. Multiple polls of people who voted for Biden NOT knowing this now 100% confirmed information show that over 15% of them would have reconsidered and likely changed their votes if they'd know he was looking them in the eye at that debate and lying about it. That would have completely changed the outcome of the election, every other factor not withstanding.
Half of twitter's staff have access to that information so that they can potentially use it. Security dude was security dude and tried to restrict access to that information. Company said no.
There's more to it than that. Engineers can romp around in the production system - generally without leaving a trail that could get them in trouble - while doing a LOT more than just looking at web server log files. For example, he pointed out that half the company (some 4000 people) could send tweets from user accounts AS that user, and leave no trail. Multiply egregious stuff like that times dozens of other examples (like
For a publicly traded company, I'd personally find that concerning as an investor when its supposed to launch people next year
Whew! What a relief that SpaceX is privately owned, then, and NOT publicly traded, right?
Sigh, this country needs to abolish political parties and career politicians. And lobbyists. and...
Which means abolishing the First Amendment. It guarantees that people can assemble into groups as they see fit (like, say, political parties). It guarantees that you can pay someone to speak on your behalf if they're better at it than you, or can do so on behalf of a larger group in order to be more effective (like, say, lobbyists).
If you think freedom of speech and assembly is no good, all you have to do is get a federal supermajority in the legislature to see your point and kill the entire Bill of Rights (it can't be picked apart on amendment at a time), and then get 37 states to ratify that alteration to the Constitution. Should be no problem.
Or
That's the whole point of this next gen smart gun. So that won't happen. Again, statistics show that what is most likely to happen is not that someone will be robbed in a way that allows them to use their firearm, but that a family member will accidentally kill themselves or another in the household. That's what this is supposed to prevent, and if it can prevent that while overcoming any response time issues when fighting off an intruder, why wouldn't you want something like that?
No, proponents of this sort of absurd hobbling of a well understood range of mechanical devices with untold millions of examples in use
Your entire thesis (the "most people get killed by their own family's guns!" meme) has been debunked on its rhetorical face value for years. It's a preposterous statistic to deploy, even if you stipulate it as even close to meaningful. The number of such household deaths (the overwhelming majority of which are suicides) is utterly eclipsed by the hundreds of thousands of times a year that family owned firearms are used to stop or prevent violent crime (see the recent, third study in a row out of the FBI, or the one done under Obama by the CDC). Firearms that can be picked up by any member of the household - even with gloves or wet hands or while not being the Magic Ring Bearer - save more lives every year than all murderers take, using any weapon at all, by orders of magnitude. And virtually all non-suicide deaths employing a household gun are deaths involving illegally possessed guns kept by people who are legally barred from purchasing or possessing them, with the murders involved typically including third party criminal activity that enters the household.
Laws requiring everyone to own only badly secured, unreliable "smart" guns won't put a dent in the murderous activity of criminals who can build their own traditional firearms as has been done for centuries, or have access to a vast black market of stolen or illegally purchased guns in the tens of millions.
Don't kid yourself or try to kid anyone else about the viability of this technology outside of some extremely specific use cases. The main interest in them, legislatively, is the ability to chip away at our constitutionally protected right to self defense by making the tools of that defense wildly more expensive or for many, unobtainable. That regressive tax on self defense falls, of course, hardest on those who most need it: it's a tax on poor people and the minorities that are over-represented in that economic class and most often subject to the violent crime that legs gun owners currently prevent tens of thousands of times every week. The politicians who live in gated communities with protection details know all of this, but are sure it won't impact them. After all, their own armed guards will be exempt from any requirement to carry such hobbled firearms. Of course.
They did have guns.
And yet the only person who used a gun at all, and did so to kill an unarmed person who had three armed officers right behind her, was a cop.
during the attempted coup
You don't really understand what a coup is, do you.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer