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Comment A good secret is known by two people (Score 1) 42

And you know where you buried the other person

If you store data or share it, you are at risk of losing that data. The more you share it and the more places you store it the more likely your secrets won't stay secret.
This is how I started my cryptography course at IBM.
These companies are storing your data and they don't care if it is leaked. They have been told what I said above, they took minimal precautions not to lose it. They took no precautions to scrub personal data. The data has some value to them and the loss to them from any breach is significantly less than this value. The fine for losing data you never should have stored in the first place should be stock price affecting. This wasn't some lucky hack, it wasn't even incompetence. The fact that they had the data shows malice.

Comment Government debt causes asset inflation (Score 1) 64

Originally, the primary purpose of the stock market is as a place where businesses could raise money for to buy or build capital. Investors would get a share of the business and that share would entitle them to some part of the companies future profits. The investor would hope that their part of the profit would cover their purchase price of the share.
Well for most companies that's never going to happen. Share prices to earnings no longer have any relation. The primary purpose of the stock market is a Ponzi scheme where the value of a share is tied to what someone else will pay.

So how did this happen?
The economy can make 2 things:
1) consumable goods and services
2) capital

Government spending is almost entirely consumable goods and services. If the government spends too much on this then there is less production left to build capital. So, with the exception of the AI bubble, we are no longer creating much new capital. The government has also created cheap money, i.e. lots of money, low interest rates, near zero risk free return on investments. With no money leaving the stock markets, no new capital being created, no good alternative to put the cheap money, money continues to flow into the stock market. If there are 1000 stocks in company A that were originally sold for $1 and someone buys one share for $2, the value of the stock is now $2000 even though only $1001 were ever put into the market.
All that money in the stock market can't be taken out by retirees and turned into consumption unless a new generation buys into this stupidity and gives up their own consumption.

Comment The problem (Score 1) 113

AI Slop often drowns out the maintainers with more bugs reports than they can read. These bug reports are often difficult to read and 99% of them require a precondition that is impossible to occur. (I've gotten some that require me to read 2^64 bytes of data, never going to happen in the life of this universe).
So even if there is a real bug somewhere in this crap, I won't see it or probably won't recognize it even if I do read it. Even if I do realize that it might really be a bug, figuring out what is truly wrong from the AI vulnerability report is going to be time consuming. A human report, if my code is open source, often has a description of how to exploit the bug and how to fix it.

Comment Manufacturing jobs - why? (Score 2) 92

Why do we want more manufacturing jobs? They are hard, boring and don't pay well. Look at what you spend money on. If you count your taxes as mostly going to wards services then most of us spend over half our earnings on services. Next comes housing, then comes food. I can go weeks without needing to buy any physically manufactured stuff.
Also this is the golden age for those who own a house. Don't think of wealth, think about consumption.
The over 50 will continue to live in luxury till they are in their 80s.
The golden age for young workers is gone because in the 70s we slowly started shifting consumption from young people to the boomers. First it was rent controls which were amazing if you already had a place and didn't want to move. This destroyed the purpose built rental industry and was the first step in causing house prices to rise faster than inflation. Then we shifted to thinking houses where an investment first and a place to live second. So we as a society decided to make it harder and harder to build any new homes to keep the house prices going up. Next we started running huge deficits which shifted spending further towards consumption and less to capital investment (most higher education isn't an investment for society as a whole). Eventually cheap money caused the stock market to inflate. There is currently no justification for the price to earnings ratios of most stock other than there is no other good place to put money.
At the same time big government has meant it is wiser for companies to spend their time and money lobbying than to innovate. We have always had lobbying and bought politicians (in the USA) but the scale of the protection has never been more.

Comment This vulnerability is in most devices (Score 1) 43

If your device can choose on its own who in the world to connect to then the manufacturer has complete control over the device. About the only devices I can think of that don't are zigbee devices but that's because you completely control the network the device is on. If the device has Wi-Fi,r cellular or satellite connectivity then you don't have complete control.

If Danish actually cared about security they would control the cellular module and only allow it to connect to their servers. The fact they didn't means they didn't care or that they are too stupid to secure their system even if they fix this issue.

Comment Trans Union in Canada had alternative in 1999 (Score 3, Interesting) 53

The Fair Isaac score was anything but fair. It predicts whether or not you will default on a loan in a given amount of time. A few key points about it:
Your score is based more on who you are than what you do. It is highly correlated with ethnic back grounds, parents income and where you lived. Does your spouce have the same last name as you, is your name in the top 100 names of the year you were born.
Your score was heavily based on where you lived even though using address wasn't legally allowed using coordinate location was.

Trans Union Canada came up with two scores instead. The first score was how likely a credit file or applicant was fraudulent. The second score was the likelihood of defaulting. By removing the fraudulent files we could stop using location for the scores and significantly decreased the dependency of the score on things a person had no control over.

Comment I have 5 kids (Score 2) 176

Asking people who don't have kids is like asking for advice from the team that never won a game

Here are the common things couples I know who had 3 or more kids together had
1) The man either had a good job or good earning potential at a young age.
2) They started having kids at or before 25
3) They were able to get a reasonable home and were secure in it, plus the option to move.
4) They had support from family

Kids are crazy expensive. Giving a family a couple thousand extra a year to have a child is an insult.
Early career opportunities for men are terrible in all of the western world. Parental leave is only good if you already have a job. Also generous parental leave likely makes employers hesitant about hiring young people.
Housing near good employment is terrible in almost all the world. There are great jobs in New York city but you can't take the jobs because there is no where to live. Young people don't need a lot of money but they need security to start building a family. Knowing that they can always have a place to live and that they have the option to move if there are other opportunities is important. Make houses and apartments a place to live not a guaranteed investment.
Family support is huge if you are the first in your friend group to have a baby. I don't think I had held a baby or played with a toddler for 15 years before I had my first child. It's always going to be scary to have a first child but when you literally haven't touched one in your adult life it is much scarier.

Comment have always been entitled and stupid - parent time (Score 2) 191

In the past the stupidity and entitlement didn't hurt us as much. Now with longer retirement, the entitlements have become a crushing burden on the young, particularly young parents. I'm not so sure it is screen time as much as lack of parent time. I would also argue it isn't women's education that causes falling birth rates, that's just a correlation. Longer life expectancy and fewer options for young men (fathers and husbands) causes women not to find suitable mates. Birth rates for men who have good careers and housing haven't changed.

Comment Re:End to end (Score 1) 21

End to end is really difficult if you
Lack the discipline to implement any kind of key management
If you are sending data and don't know who you are sending it too (yes, this really happens)
If you don't know that you are sending the data or assume someone else is encrypting it and sending it for you

But there is a far far worse thing than not encrypting data. Not adding authentication to data that others will act on. Think of someone being able to pretend they are you to the bank and request the bank transfer money from your account. They might be able to do that by modifying an existing message, a message that they might not be able to read and they might not know what the amount being transferred is, but the bank might still accept it. Now replace bank with military or large industrial site.

Comment Non internet connected (Score 3, Informative) 90

I make internet connected IoT devices. Most of the money and almost all the venture capital is in controlling the devices. It is extremely lopsided. I was at a standards meeting and a stupid requirement came up that would increase the cost and complexity of the IoT devices. The final vote was 190 to 4 in favour of the stupidity. That's when we, the no side, realized that there were only 4 of us trying to make devices to conform to the standard and 190 that wanted to control it.
So all the investors want is to control and to monetarize the devices after the sale. Either with a monthly subscription, upselling you on other things, ads or selling your personal data. If there is not recurring money then companies don't want to maintain the cloud. Its a liability if there is security breach and no upside to continuing the service.
The incentives are all messed up.
I hate to say it but your best option is an Amazon Echo and Zigbee devices. Amazon is by far the most advanced in their cloud infrastructure and zigbee control of devices. They also have a huge vested interest in you keeping the Echo as the center of your home IoT network. They are the company who's long term interest in the IoT area most aligns with a home owner. It's like google having the best email. It isn't because they love you, it's because their long term interests happen to align with yours in this one area.

Comment Fact checking and bias (Score 1) 212

Even when the media gets the facts correct, they tell me how to think about it. I'm not counting fox news which is entertainment. I'm talking about the WSJ, CNN or CBC (canada). They all have a left wing opinion. CBC is the worst. Poor person does something stupid we have to bail them out. Landlords, corporations, insurance companies, banks, capitalism always bad.
It is now easier than ever to fact check an article. In the 90s my economics prof gave us a 1% bonus for each article that we submitted that had an economics error in it but the error couldn't involve math because that was too easy. It should be easier now for journalists to at least get the math right but outside of the sports section math literacy amoung journalists is worse now.

Comment Broken but not the way people think (Score 2) 221

Think of where the money is going
The USA is 4% of the worlds population but they pay for 75% of the cost of comercializing healthcare drugs and treatments. So in many ways the rest of the world is freeloaders off the American system.
The insurance companies aren't making huge profits, the hospitals and other providers are. My co-pay for a blood test was the same as what I would have paid without insurance at a private provider in Canada. My co-pay for an utlra sound was 50% more than what I would have paid without insurance at a private clinic in Canada. The difference being in Canada it would have been 2+ months to see my doctor, get the referal and then get the test. In the USA it was done in less than an hour. Also in Canada, if I got the treatment provided by Canadian healthcare, I would have spent more on the parking than my USA co pay because my appointment would have taken over 12 hours. (I once had a 7am appointment and wasn't seen till 7:45pm)

I can read my Canadian bill. My USA bills are convoluted and there is always one more entity that wants to be paid. I think the confusion is intentional. It makes it impossible to price shop. Hospitals and other providers are using this to screw individuals. They are definitely doing it to screw the insurance providers. The insurance providers need better ways to push back at the hospitals.

Comment Economics 101 (Score 1) 270

Economies have 2 inputs - capital and labour. They have 2 outputs - consumption and capital. Capital is created by savings,i.e. postponed consumption.This is true if you are a capitalist, communist, or feudal system.
A socialist system is a capitalistic system that taxes the profitable to redistribute consumption to the common good or the less fortunate.
If you spend too much on consumption as a society, you crowd out capital creation. If you tax profits too much, you leave less for future capital investment, discourage investment and eventually cause capital and ambitious people to leave.
If you try and tax wealth, then you are taxing capital, the means of production. You are waving a magic wand and turning your factories and tomorrow's production into consumption today.
If a society consumes more than they produce, the difference must be a trade deficit.

Comment Embedded software is hard (Score 3, Insightful) 62

Not super hard but you have to plan and architect it and you have to have a little bit of discipline with documentation and not allowing crappy code to be submitted. Unfortunately this low bar is well beyond 95% of companies. Most places think a project manager, who knows nothing about code but does know Jira and agile, can run a project by having the test team create bug tickets and randomly assigning tickets to engineers.

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