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Comment Grand Cultural Errors (Score 1) 259

As early as the 1950s, critics of the establishment's public education system said its main purpose was to produce a contented and functional workforce. And they were right. They were so right that even they themselves did not understand the full implications: they were so right that it ultimately made them wrong. And then they won, and we are facing the consequences. Not just since 2013: Arne Duncan was indeed an unmitigated disaster for American education, but much of the problem is older than him. And no one is willing to admit that what came before worked better.

Comment Some perspective (Score 1) 270

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

Comment Re:News flash, subtext (Score 2) 34

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 104

>It's one of the few segments in IT where you're not directly at constant risk of being replaced by an H1B.

Truth. One of the reasons why I keep gravitating back to defense work. Only since around 2004 or so; there's now this "government shutdown" nonsense, which is a bit of a vicious circle, because programs get fucked over, then you have to roll off the contract and find work on another. And sometimes, there isn't any. (happened to me at Lockheed), so some people have to cycle back into the private sector for a few years (which isn't a bad thing; because THAT is where you pick up new skills, to be honest). Then when some asshole "businessman" crashes the business and does layoffs (to replace you with H1B's), you're back on the street again, and you end up back in the "safe" sector: defense. Oh, and if your Clearance expires while you're in the private sector, then the contractor just pays the $10k (or whatever it is now) to re-do your investigation. This has happened to me twice now.

Comment Re: Is AI writing click-bait headlines for lazy... (Score 1) 143

I figured that there has to some sort of "law" (akin to Godwin's or Moore's, not an actual law obvs) that the answer to any question in a headline must be "no".

Voila: Betteridge's law of headlines
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

I feel like today has regained some purpose.

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