The current international rules and norms favor the United States. We organized trade routes, pricing in US dollars and dispute resolutions in a way that slightly favors the USA. The world generally doesn't have tariffs on services and the USA is by far the world leader in exporting services. The rest of the work accepts American intellectual rules that significantly favor the USA.

The rest of the world accepted American leadership because in 1945 the USA was the world leader in trade, in promoting free trade, protecting trade, in trade and relations expertise. The USA was also paying to rebuild Europe and parts of Asia.

The world continued to accept these slightly skewed trade rules because negotiating new rules is hard and the USA, was in large part a reliable, trust worthy and intelligent leader in world trade that had spent 80 years building good will and making everyone rich.

Trump has blown up all that good will, he has destroyed the trustworthiness of the USA and no one thinks of American policy as intelligent. The USA still has by far the most vibrant economy in the world, they are the leaders or are second in almost every market that matters, farming, mining, AI, software... However, the rest of the world will slowly reconfigure trade away from the US. It will take a while. Countries will suck up to Trump during this transition but they will move away. It took 80 years (or 150 depending on who you are) for the current global system to be created. It will take a while to realign it but it will happen.

We will all be poorer when the existing system is replaced. No one else can fill the role the old, reliable, intelligent USA used to hold.

When I get life insurance I'm betting I will die. The bet pays my family if I win. Same with fire insurance. I win if my house burns down. Now suppose I live in a place with wildfire risk. I might be temped to bet that my community will be destroyed by a fire. It might be financially better for me to use a prediction market than a traditional insurance company. Predictive markets do have the potential to be used to mitigate risk.

I understand wealth is easier to measure than consumption but other than that why are so many, possibly a majority of people so focused on the wealthy having to much wealth? Wealth is the means of production. Why do you care who owns it? Shouldn't your main concern be that the wealth we have is well used? And that we are creating more wealth to make future generations more productive? What you should care about is how much consumption people have. A house is wealth, it provides housing. Personally I think it is more important to have housing for young people, housing that allows people to move and have geographic mobility and enough housing for everyone than have housing as the primary investment vehicle for the middle class. I think it is more important that people have inexpensive food, that they can conveniently buy regardless of who owns the grocery store. If you track consumption you will notice it isn't the top 0.01% of people that are competing with you for it. The rich don't eat more than you, they are not your main competition for housing in places you want to live. They don't consume enough healthcare or vacations or cars to in anyway have an effect on what is left for you. The very rich probably have the same cell phone as you.

In fact if you do think about consumption you might be able to figure out why our youth are so f#$ked and who is screwing them so badly. Unfortunately most people can't bring themselves to think like this because they want to be the screwers.

When I did pen testing, for the few products that seemed to have any clue what they were doing, I always scrutinized the random number generator. 2^40 is not that big that you can't run it for a short time, create say 2^32 numbers, sort them and look for patterns (in this case you would likely find a collision). Of the companies that seemed to care about security, I'm guessing 60% screwed up random numbers*. It is so prevalent that every tester should be looking at it.

And one entity, the US government, had a non-standard random number generator, that they couldn't explain in the original version of Open SSL (yes the US government paid for it). It did pass all the randomness tests I tried but it wasn't the algorithm they claimed. With random number generators you "merge" in entropy from a physical source into your entropy pool because your physical source could have a "bias" or uneven distribution to its bits.

And that's just developers. So this works out to $2 each. I get the motivation and sentiment but to really make a difference you need 4 more zeros. If you are a socialist and want to make a difference learn basic math including division and then figure out something that meaningfully changes things. Like if the studios are pure evil, create a coop studio or a coop publisher. I mean with all the questionable things the evil Capitalistic publishers do shouldn't a union of people with expertise in the field be able to create some alternative?

When boomers spend money on healthcare that consumption does go up in smoke. It is a one time consumption and it is a consumption that is redirected away from younger people. The entire point of our economy is to provide consumption - housing, healthcare, food, entertainment... The Elon Musks of the world aren't consuming all the housing, they don't eat more than you and I, they have the same cell phone as you and I. In fact if, Musk can't possibly spend a penny more than he currently does on himself, his mistresses and his various children. Every penny you tax from him is a penny not spent on new capital for future generations. Your anger at the super rich is misplaced. Our youth are f#$ked over by the over 55 consuming must of what our economy makes.

I've found flaws in many cryptographic systems. Most of the time people are implementing the cryptography correctly but making bad assumptions, protecting the wrong things, or out right using the cryptography incorrectly.

A few examples
*UK smart metering implicit certificates are based on the North American certificates except they swapped the order of the key reconstruction data and use a longer elliptic curve. The trouble is, by swapping the fields the new certs are vulnerable to a hash collision attack and since the old certs were not vulnerable, only a 128 bit hash was used. So the UK certs have a security level of 2^64. (all hashes are only secure to hash collisions for half their bit size from a meet in the middle attack - despite what British GHCQ might say)
*X509 certs use ASN1 encoding. ASN1 parsers are notorious for parsing badly formed ASN1, unfortunately they don't all parse badly formed ASN1 the same way. An attacker could have an X509 cert signed by a certificate authority that thinks it is signing one thing but is signing something that another parser thinks is something else.
*IoT standards that have 128 bit encryption for privacy but only 32 bit for authentication. Most IoT messages don't need privacy and based on message lengths you can guess what the message is anyway. Unfortunately, if I can guess what a valid message is, I can then flip the bits in the message to create a malicious message and have a 1 in 2^32 chance of not being caught. If I'm attacking 1000 things and I don't care which one I compromise 1 in 2^32 isn't that big of a number.

The most important part of our justice system is to create the illusion that people don't get away with crimes. In the 60s the conviction rate was in the 80-90% it's now around 50%. To keep our society functioning we need to think that people won't get away with murder and theft. As our policing, surveillance and forensic abilities have gotten better our conviction rate for murders has fallen. That would imply a large portion of our convictions in the past were incorrect. Our new abilities have mostly gone towards proving people innocent.

The first time someone cheats, puts no effort into the assignment and you see the university does nothing about it you might think it is a one off thing. Maybe a few more students will cheat but not 32 out of 35. What has happened is after watching their class mates put zero effort in and get better grades than them, more and more students started cheating. They became more and more confident as there it became obvious there would be no repercussion. We see this with any honor system that rewards cheating. Also 32 out of 35 got caught. The other 3 probably still cheated. 2 of them might not have known how to use copy and paste and one might have proof skimmed the AI output.

When I was in university in the early 90s there were students graduating who couldn't speak English and it's questionable if they could read the assignments and exam questions well enough to answer them. Their secret was to only take classes from professors who never changed their exams or assignments. We confronted one such prof that his assignments were too hard and everyone else was cheating, he removed some of the requirements from the assignment and guess what, everyone but our group submitted assignments that magically had the removed features. There were threats of consequence but in the end absolutely nothing happened. (University of Waterloo Computer science)

It has always been true that you can cheat, memorize old exams, or just memorize patterns to pass university or you can actually learn the material. And it is also true that unless you have a good prof, who truly spends the time to see if his class understands, the former method will lead to better marks.

Your drivers license has your Date of Birth, your address and probably a few more identifiers on it. Plus it is only available to people who pass a driving test. So it 1 gives up more privacy than you should give up, and it is not universally available. Those that don't have one will have to provide significantly more uniquely identifying information

Unless your response was sarcasm?

Trump has a problem with the truth. He keeps saying the Iranians agreed to things that they didn't and is angry when they don't follow what he imagines they said.

But the bigger problem is Iran isn't negotiating with Trump. They are negotiating with the USA. The USA went back on the last deal the Iran made over nuclear fuel enrichment. The USA attacked and assassinated the Iranian leadership while the Iranians thought the USA was negotiating with them. No matter what the Iranians agree to there is nothing stopping the USA from attacking or changing the deal. The USA signed a treaty to protect Ukraine from any aggression when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, the USA has torn up or threatened to rescind trade agreements with their closest friends. There is no arbitrator or court that the USA needs to answer to. Which means there is no deal that Trump can sign that is worth the paper it is written on.

If you and I want to enter any kind of contract we have to uniquely know who each other are. If you don't have a single, national ID, I then have to know your name, date of birth, address, phone number, previous addresses, mother's maiden name etc so that I can uniquely identify you. And then we just assume companies need to know our slashdot id, sex, eye color, height, sexual orientation, weight...

At this point I think as an organization, losing might actually be better for the Dems. Losing increases the donations and number of volunteers they get. Winning means governing and having to fulfill conflicting promises. The Republicans, batshit crazy as they are, want to win.

Bare with me this takes a bit of logic
The purpose of the economy is to produce things for humans to consume.
The economy has 2 inputs, Capital and Labour, and two outputs more capital and consumption.
We produce more than we ever have in history.
*Billionaires and Trillionaires do not consume much more food than the rest of us. They consume more luxury items than regular people but not 1000x more. Most of the earnings of the very rich go to producing more capital.

*The over 55 make up 27% of the Canadian population. If they are working, they have the highest incomes of any workers. They have pensions and investment income. They enjoy living in the most desirable parts of our cities. They enjoy 60% of the healthcare. The over priced housing represents trillions in consumption transfer from younger workers to them. My guess is that the oldest 27% of Canadians are being subsidized, if you include the over priced housing, by 30% of Canadian GDP. This is on top of their earnings and pensions.

The first liars are the over 55, crying poor and voting for more benefits to themselves. Voting to further restrict new housing to push up the value of their homes.
The second liars are the wanna be boomers, those that are hoping the pyramid scheme of our economy will keep going just one more generation. They own homes with huge mortgages. They are counting the days till they retire.

The moron - this is the person blaming the billionaires for their plight. For their lack of opportunity. You have to feel sorry for the moron. They are desperate for an easy solution and the two liars are happy to let the moron blame the billionaire for their plight.

Every contract you enter into requires both parties to uniquely identify each other. Without a unique government ID number the parties will have to know names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, email address and probably your mother's maiden name. Giving all that is far more of an invasion of privacy than giving someone a 9 digit number. Yes, maybe fewer of those identifiers will work for a given person but for some people you will need the entire set of personal information.