The little privately run airports often don't have towers at all, and "air traffic control" is the pilot announcing "I'm ten miles north of the field at five thousand feet" to everyone listening on the same radio frequency. It doesn't matter if you're a billionaire in a G-V or a schlub in a powered parachute.

While I don't disagree per se that this should be the model, I do wonder which reality you live in where it currently is.

I will not say black is "special" but you cannot simply replace it with another color. There is no function that a male in the US cannot attend wearing black. The only thing a man can wear that's even simpler in its appropriateness for all events is a military uniform.

The only thing worse than not having metrics... ... is having metrics.

Big companies are almost always stupid.

Organizations measure what is easy for them to measure, not what actually matters. The drift between what matters and what gets measured always produces dumb behaviors.

Measuring token usage is perhaps a proxy for "is this person trying to use AI?". That question is only interesting if you are quite confident that at some point, your staff will be able to grow the business value they produce as a result of using AI.

What you actually should measure is business value delivered. Companies are bad at that (Because its difficult), So instead they Measure what is easy to measure, and they don't test the assumption that AI helps staff deliver more BV.

At my small software company, having developers use Claude is delivering tremendous BV. We are getting higher quality PRs, code reviews, and built software, and we are getting it faster. We are getting MUCH faster bug investigations. Overall time to fix is down. We are shipping faster and we are paying down technical debt.

(we may be accumulating new technical debt we don't see yet. time will tell)

The cheap way to get into graphene is to get a used Pixel 7a off of Ebay or Backmarket.

Make sure you don't get the verizon specific mmWave SKU. You need one that advertises itself as OEM Unlockable / Bootloader Unlockable. Verizon SKUs aren't.

(Some Ebay sellers give you the model # and some even show the specific phone with the OEM unlocking flag available. Backmarket doesn't let you specify you don't want the broken garbage verizon sku, so be prepared to return a few until you get one that isn't defective)

GrapheneOS is fantastic. I've been running it for over a year, and it's what I've mandated that my teens have on their phones also.

You should read up on what GrapheneOS actually does. Most google apps will work on it, if you want them to.

My daily driver user profile has no google apps installed nor google services enabled. I have an alternate user profile with sandboxed google play enabled, where I can run google maps or a handful of other dumb apps, when/if I want to. Even then, sandboxed google play (GrapheneOS exclusive feature) is a much better implementation than running the same app on a vanilla google phone. And, when you don't need that specific app, and are logged out of the "worse privacy" profile, the app and the google services are 100% inert.

I take a different view towards things: if the _only_ way I can use a service is to use their shitty mobile app, then I try very hard not to do business with that company at all.

Waymo, for instance, absolutely refuses to run on Graphene because they want strong integrity/attestation. Note that in the case of GrapheneOS, a GOS device is _more secure_ and _more trustworthy_ than any other consumer android advice. So app developers using the Google integrity APIs in such a way that Graphene is blocked are not interested in security, they are either stupid or are are interested in exfiltrating your data, so much so that if they cannot have their data harvesting rootkit on your phone, they refuse to let you use their service. So idiots, evil, or evil idiots. Inany of those cases, why would you run those apps? Why would you do business with those entities?

In my daily driver profile, I use almost exclusively FOSS apps.

GrapheneOS + immich + NextCloud does a pretty good job of completely replacing the google stack for someone who is privacy concious and into self-hosting.

When talking to nosy people or organizations, I just tell them I don't have a smartphone. We should all vigorously resist the idea that having a smartphone running corporate spyware is a requirement for modern life. In government, and also in our consumer choices.

A couple of things of interest.

1) "Colorado" in this case means "Red". It does indeed also mean "colored" and even "dyed" but the term mostly means "red" to Spanish speakers. Kind of weird that a right wing political party would call itself "red".
2) The opposition party is amazingly known as Partido Liberal Radical Auténtico which means "Authentic Radical Liberal Party". They remain a far distant second in Paraguayan politics because they lack a national vision and are just a collection of splinter groups, each loyal to various regional politicians.

The Democrats can make the Republicans vote. Vote to not convict Whiskey Pete, Little Marco, et al. Then hang those votes around their necks in 2 years. Make the GOP vote against raising taxes on the rich. Etc. Etc.

How much has your government money grown in that time?

This "credible lead" (i.e. "we decided that, our of all the cars that kinda look like the one we were looking for, yours with the child seats was the one used in the drive-by") sounds a lot like that line from the Usual Suspects:

Cop: "I can put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking."

Hockney: "Really? I live in Queens. Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? What, do you got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?"

Illegal doesnâ(TM)t mean I donâ(TM)t have the right to record, tho. Government doesnâ(TM)t give rights.

I loved that book but it was a thick one and a long time ago, so I don't remember that specifically. But I believe you.

I am reminded of Ted K's writings - specifically on the enablement-virtuous-cycle between tech level, state control, authortarianism, etc.

The replacement of uniform broadcast media with "decentralized" culture and media has thrown a wrench in things. The tech we had in the 50s-80s enabed one form of mass control. The changing tech broke those specific mechanisms, but the System responded.

The fight over control of twitter was actually like trying to re-litigate WW1 The dying princes of the dying imperial system were all trying to install their preferred ruler; not realizing that decentralization had already won.

People will occupy twitter if they can, but holding that territory was already non-essential by the time it changed hands.

The system response has certainly not let go of trying to reclaim overt control over all top-100 information warfare tiles on the board, but has invested in subterfuge and compartmentalization as well.

If the system cannot control a single monoculture, it is also happy to have significant influence over 100 microcultures that are functionally disjoint with non-porous boundaries.

Ted K would say that America has become functionally ungovernable. I agree. We have much evidence of being a failed state. Now, if you shut off the internet and the news, and just went about your life, you might not see any evidence of it. But we are sort of like an observer on the ground, watching a plane fly overhead at FL350. The plane's engines are out because it is out of gas. From the ground, to us, it looks fine. It looks like every other plane. It will stay up there, really high, for a good long while. It will have passed out of our view by the time it has lost enough altitude to notice.

But the plane is doomed. The people onboard know. The people with the right sensors know.

America is like that plane. It is going to fall out of the sky. But most observers don't know that yet.

Internet censorship won't restart the engines. That doesn't mean they won't keep trying anyway.

"You young pup!"

Now I'm sad. :(

He used to do a one man show of a Christmas Carol on stage. I never got to see it, but I always imagined it being amazing (based on the fact that it happened more than once... if it were ass, it would not have recurred). While the source material is relatively friendly to the idea, one man shows are hard to do well.

Tivo broke Civilization.

The olds will remember.

In the early 80s, every American watched the same TV programs at the same time. LIve, broadcast TV. It was the national American culture. Everyone at work and at school the next morning talked about their shared experience and varying reactions to the BroadCast that The Party had shown them the prior night.

Cable TV - by offering a few more channels - had _some_ impact on the "breakup" of America.

But it was Tivo - mass-scale consumer time shifting. Americans no longer watched all the same propaganda at the same time.

The monoculture started to crack.

The rest of it is downstream from there. The bigs tried to retain their control of culture and opinion, but it became too fragmented and too decentralized. They couldn't.

Nobody is mad about the internet. They are mad they don't control the internet.