the answer to that one is actually kind of obvious, IMHO where do put large number of gold bars that does not result in people asking a lot of questions?

Safety deposit boxes? - I guess if spread it around enough separate banks, you have some privacy accessing the box (usually) but you still are not the only one handling it, gold is very very put much of it a given box and it might raise questions. One nosy bank manager might become a real problem quickly.

Bury it in the woods? - That works unless someone finds it, how undisturbed can make the local landscape appear? Did anyone say a local sheriff, game warden, etc get curious about that pickup beside the road?

Even transport carries a lot of risk, - what if you get pulled over, and an over zealous officer decides to search the car? Sure legally you might be able to get the discovery excluded from evidence but you're not getting the gold back..

Given it someone else? - Who do you that both won't ask questions, is dishonest enough to help you do something they reasonably can guess isn't on the up and up, and also trusty worthy enough to not help themselves?

40 million in gold without some documentation as to why you have it is rather a problem. Even you hammered it into look alikes of 17th century Spanish coins and claimed you found it diving off the Florida keys, a whole lot of entities are going to show up asking questions and asserting it should be theirs, just look what Mel Fisher went thru!

1000X ^^THIS

I am not say we never as nation need to conduct clandestine operations, but having an entire clandestine service is fundamentally at odds with the concept of representative governance, day light, and democracy.

The CIA should not exist. It should be shuttered and actually operations running agents and gathering intel should be returned to the DOD, and even if for reasons of operational security a considerable amount of activity has to be done off the record, the people running those activities should be far enough down the chain of command that when gross failures occur and are discovered there can be accountability.

IE some General officer can say "you dun fuk'd up, you're demoted/fired bring your people in and shut down the operation" vs our current system of congressional hearings where everyone shouts at each other, the people in questions just lie and evade knowing full well any hard evidence of their obvious purgery went in the shred bin already.

I guess that is what gets most fraudsters in the end. Seems like the guy made a career out of false claims and progressively bolder lies. Probably started to believe he could away with anything.

This isn't just taking shortcuts though this wholesale negligence.

Once in a while you hear such and such President/CEO of ACME never really graduated from Some Small University. They lied to get past the HR gate got hired as manager or director of Widget production 15 years ago where they were not an officer not responsible for signature on public records etc, later got promoted and nobody went back and checked up on stuff.

This though, the claims this guy made were shall we say rather remarkable for such a short career, service in multiple military branches, a graduate degree, pilot, managing a lot of people, etc.. A bunch of things that should have said to anyone reading the resume, this sounds perhaps a little puffed up, maybe I should check on SOME of this stuff which should have produced a few easily obtained artifacts. Obviously zero effort was made to verify any of it. Clearly nobody did any DD here not the hiring manager, not OMB..

I can't say I have run down every line on every CV of everyone I have hired but I usually at least go, ok says he was such and such at XYZ corp, lets look their about-us page on wayback machine, ok there is a picture of him a title that is near enough...so that checks.. oh he is a licensed PI, ok I can check the states website for that.. Then you just consider the claims, like ok says he graduated in 2000 and in 2003 was president of XYZ corp, again you check out XYZ oh fine it looks like they have about 4 employees and rented office in suburban Cincinnati; whatever, on the other hand if it is a 4000+ people and they have a XYZ Parkway named after them, you pick the phone and check that out.

Answer non of that matters. Almost all of those laws do not apply to the president, other federal employees, and in some cases legislators yes but the president largely is except for law that would prohibit him from trading based on his knowledge of confidential information.

He IS obligated by his oath of office to act in the interests of the United States, but he can profit from that as far as the law goes mostly.

disagree that is precisely the same question as "the script at dfgjkdf.bit.ly would like to save a file, allow?" as far as the ordinary user is concerned. They have no idea if it is a good idea to allow that or not and at the moment can't take the steps to even try to figure that out.

No the SaaS/Ad guys are the ones that want that API. The whole thing is opaque to the user. That is f'ing terrible for you and me! I can't for example (easily anyway) find the data I created stored by that API to backup, use in some other application, etc. It is all opaque to me. Again as for as Joe Normie is concerned they still have complete control over that data in terms of lock in etc. They just don't have to pay to store it for him. Which brings us to how they are actually going to use it, they will use it cache a bunch of app assets while they continue to offsite any actual information to where they can mine it.

or hear me out on this rather than wasting actually resources, the browser APIs could just add something like sleep(rand(250)) in the path of read() along the i/o thread.

for the same of breaking the side channel attack it probably does not need to even be a particularly good secure random implementation as long as the seeds are unique to browser process/session.

The entire web security model is broken.

Experienced web developers don't understand Same Origin Policy, Content Security Policy, and often even cookie scope completely. As you say no end user ever could without becoming at least a capable amateur web guy/gal themselves.

To use a car analogy:
Asking for permissions at this point would be like a Toyota Corolla popping up a dialog on the dash board "Would you like to advance timing by 1.5 degrees?" while the driver is cruising along I-70. The percentage of drivers who could think about the question intelligently is small, the number of them familiar enough the current state of that specific car in terms of tune, conditions, etc without doing additional analysis no practical while operating is even smaller.

The simple inescapable reality of the browser sandbox is waaaay to open. The problem is that is how the SaaS, Ad, CDN, Surveillance capital, guys want it! And low and behold one of the biggest players in all of these spaces are the ones that make the worlds most popular browser engine... Realistically there is no way the oridiary end user can have useful online experience and maintain any sort of operation security/privacy/etc on the modern web.

Either we accept it or we come up with some kind of replacement application delivery solution, that has a much much more restrictive sandbox model, that operates from default deny, and forces application designers to be extremely choosy about what resources outside their package they fetch/contact/open/write/etc to, a lot more like mobile packages. From an end user privacy/opsec standpoint the WWW-browser/agent is DEAD.

Bullshit, all the memory safety could be implemented with some set of factory and clean up functions that are always the 'owners'. All the bounds checking could be implemented with some macro version/replacements of C's control flow constructs.

There is literally nothing stopping you from doing everything RUST does in plain C, except for the fact it would result in a confusing syntax and nobody would want to work on your project.

Ditto you could certainly build just about all of C++ in C as well, in fact the first C++ compilers actually transpiled to C.

Remember is really is just a macro assembler, and a standard library. C can do anything precisely because it isn't much to begin with. That isn't a knock on Kernighan or Ritchie, I think C was brilliant engineering solution that allow precisely enough abstraction to make a portable systems language that was efficent for humans and still compact enough to compile on wide range of often very limited hardware of the time. However it is important to remember a key element of engineering is that engineers solve problems within a mixture of physical and declared constraints. When you change the constraints, the solution should at some point change as well. I love C, I am not saying C has outlived it usefulness or anything of the kind, but it might actually be the case that C isn't the right solution when it comes for kernel development targeting general use (as opposed to embedded or specially integrated) computer systems anymore. We are not trying to run entire universities on time sharing systems with less than 4MB or primary storage..

yeah I was in HighSchool when those "Silent Witness" boxes first showed up. I don't know how many cameras there actually were (if any) or if the district just put them on "problem buses" or what but I distinctly remember one of them was not latched correctly and came open when taking a corner, to reveal the box was empty save for a wire running directly the little red light bulb you were supposed to think meant it was recording..

I don't think you can pin our cultures issues with death on Puritanism. Strip away everything else and at its root Puritanism is a Christian sect. Christianity is a faith that is quite concerned with what death is, its implications, and gives a lot of consideration to implications of the death the Messiah and the gruesome circumstances of it.

I do agree as an American our culture has developed a very odd relationship with the reality of death, I don't think you blame Christianity for it. In fact I think the decline of Christianity has a lot do with it. Especial as young people no longer attend Christian burials, don't go to funerals of their church members etc and see and experience bodies, and others dealing with death and loss.

We have institutionalized and industrialized death to the point that when someone dies even if it is a close family member in many cases a phone call is made to to mortuary and that is the last time anyone who knew that person will see them or have anything to do with it, other cutting a check.

By all means attempt to unpack the strange relationship American culture has with death but do it without the Christophic bias..

It is almost like just hiring employees so the competition does not, and staffing up to support largely speculative growth projects wasn't actually all that smart.

I don't understand why people think a lot of these things are 'products'. I have seen a ton of security industry stuff in the last month that once you peel back the marketing glossy, you find out that it is a just a tool that generates longer more verbose prompts from simpler ones, and for the better ones that means insertion of content from the 'system prompt' so you get something that is at least considered and somewhat consistent. The crappier examples just run with whatever the model tends to spit out in absense if inputs beside the prompt.

Next they shovel the four pages of instructions they wrote into claude code or codex where upon some MCP or skills that just wrap whatever APIs their product already had 3 years ago do all the heavy lifting, again these are the better ones... the crappier examples let the model dicker around with trying to use curl, and bash in some container to do unverified/validated operations which may or may not lead correct results even if they do happen to execute and return 0.

Finally some pretty charts with paragraphs of plausible sounding text underneath come out, but we are left to wonder if any of it can be taken seriously or relied on.

-- The shovelware isnt even shovelware anymore the who product is just fancy claude prompt. It is all getting downright scary, and painfully apparent a large portion of the decisions makes don't have the slight grasp on how any of this works.

Exactly this.

You don't have to look back to many decades to notice that older people were by and large in better health.

Survivor bias you say! Ok sure more people live longer now, but a lot of that has to do with injuries and acute illness being more survivable now than it was. What does the picture really look like when adjust for the people who did not die TB, Polio complications, serious infections, physical injury, etc. How does the chronic disease picture compare for the octogenarian cohort across decades then.

Which gets us back to red meat, alcohol use, cooking with tallow, smoked as means of preservation, salted as means of preservation, etc foods and lifestyles have been with us the entire time. it is a lot of virtuous things like eating our vegetables fresh out the garden not shipping in cold storage for days or weeks, physical exercise/labor, we have removed.

I have transacted a number of homes and land parcels, so while I am no insider to the real-estate biz I mostly understand the entities and relationships that exist at least in the non commercial space.

I can't understand why sellers would want this in the general case. Typically when you list a home or property you generally want to sell it as fast as possible. Narrow exception being you have not yet identified a new primary residence, even then most sellers will need the equity or be looking at bridge loan so you'd still be wanting to get the current listing under contract so you can understand what the cost and life time of the bridge loan are likely to be. Otherwise you are looking to get out because the long you own after you decide you no longer want to do, you're just being eaten by carry costs: fire insurance, liability (if it just a parcel), utilities, taxes, and maintenance. In summary you want to solicit the largest number of competing offers from the biggest pool potential buyers as quickly as possible.

You are already paying your seller's agent commission, they are supposed to be working for YOU, in what world again under the general case is hiding your listing from potential buyers even if only for a short time good for you?

Now imagine you are buyer, again you'll be paying commission, the agent should be working for you, in what world are better served if chose to limit the potential listings to match your with vs the whole of the market. Zilow is easy, if I was buying I'd scroll thru the listings on my phone and for sure if I saw something that looked good the agent hadn't matched me with I'd be ask why, and I'd want a decent explanation how come they did not include it..

I do realize there are unique properties which might you might want to market more selectively. A land parcel for example that is a good location but will require significant title and easement work before its accessible/buildable/farmable/whatever; sure you might shop that to only sophisticated buyers who understand the details, costs, and risks there because otherwise you're going to get a bunch of offers on paper with standard contingencies, that have you going - dude it is right here in the listing there is a utilities easement but the local power company will need their name added as user or have the easement made public; so already we don't have a contract can you read? You need a buyer who gets that they are going to have to probably bribe^H^H^H^H^H compensate the neighbors to add name to easement because they might figure it is nicer if nobody builds anything there, on the other hand they might consider the improvement to the value of their own property should the question of getting power if desired be removed, but someone has to do the organizing work of getting all the parties to act.

Similarly buildings that are 'historic' and such again you might want to qualify the buyers.