The possibility of Israel having zero-days for WhatsApp as cyberweapons is a good reason for anyone in Iran's military and leadership to delete WhatsApp. It's not a good reason for ordinary people to do that though.
Iran wants ordinary people to do that because they want to minimize any common means ordinary people might have of organizing right now.
A person who isn't interested in checking the facts is orders of magnitude better controlled than a person who can't.
Worse than that, he's proven that a crime committed over the full course of a single presidential term is one that happens too fast for the law to catch - see the emoluments case against him during his first term.
AirBNB issues are just an ornament on top of the 3-tier wedding cake of today's housing price insanity.
The bottom tier serving as the foundation of this disaster cake is the idea that a house should not just be a place to live, but an investment that should appreciate over time, and thus that there should be a "property ladder." Huge fucking mistake.
Tier 2 is NIMBYs enacting zoning laws that all have the effect of restricting housing supply, which they have done successfully for decades.
And the top tier with your little AirBNB figurines perched on top is the fact that houses are still mostly hand-built one at a time like it's 1959.
And good luck fixing all this when profiting from runaway housing prices is not only big business, but also a huge fraction of voters have most of their net worth tied up in it. Never before has a speculative asset bubble sunk its claws so deep into an economy and society over such a long period of time.
An ICE design engineer I know (who really wants engines that turn most of their input energy directly into waste heat to not be obsolete in cars) likes switchgrass for producing ethanol in the US.
Pension schemes generally work like long-running intergenerational ponzi schemes that won't collapse as long as the next generation is always bigger and/or wealthier than the last. It's not a good system but trading off some "bigger" for some "wealthier" by reducing inequality could mitigate it. Inequality is also the root cause of falling births in developed societies (that the same ownership class that most wants endless population growth prefers to tiptoe around) so it would improve both issues.
Came here to say that the only surprising thing is that it was *sold,* I assumed it was just handed over for free since at least 9/11.
I was thinking the tsetse fly should be another top candidate, in the past they made it almost impossible to keep animals for livestock or transportation in large swathes of Africa, and the control efforts that continue to this day are massively destructive including wantonly burning natural foliage and killing wild animals they could feed on!
VW was smart enough not to keep any records of when Winterkorn was informed of the problem and allowed it to continue:
https://www.houstonchronicle.c...
https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
I also remember reading around the time that the scandal broke that Martin Winterkorn was smart enough to not be too specific when he instructed engineers to find a way to make the cars pass emissions within budget or they'd be fired, and that he didn't care how they did it.
Interesting story, I also heard from an engineer at GM who was involved in testing VW's diesels to find out how they were passing emissions with what seemed to be far fewer tradeoffs than any other manufacturer. They didn't figure it out because the cars would go into cheat mode on their testing equipment, and unless you did kind of hybrid dyno run/emissions test to show that power was reduced during the emissions test, or an on-road rolling emissions test to show that real-world emissions were higher (the type that unveiled the cheating) it would be incredibly difficult to find out that the cheat mode even existed.
Probably something like a printer ink scenario, but possibly even more expensive, and with a limited shelf life.
It may be possible to get cheap refill kits from Aliexpress that work well apart from some extraneous "FREE XINJIANG" output.
They haven't touched the person ultimately responsible, Martin Winterkorn, just as they won't touch Zuck.
More specifically I'd bet the expenditure to revenue ratio of the technology is unprecedented, in a bad way.
I think one obvious bright line should be never force people to prematurely decommission a productive asset. You should be able to drive your old truck for as long as it runs. At very least efficiency standards and energy source mandates should only ever apply to new-kit.
An example of how this can go wrong can be seen in the trucking industry - they're keeping grandfathered-in trucks (or at least the powertrains from trucks) from the late-00's and earlier on the road to avoid buying new trucks or new truck engines, leading to massively increased pollution indefinitely. Not rebuilding a vintage truck engine for the umpteenth time could be seen as "prematurely decommissioning a productive asset."
Yep this is the fundamental, unavoidable problem that Google wants to not only gloss over, but distract from. AI + Capitalism = Dystopia.
All his other mistakes pale in comparison to the time he not only thought this shit but said it out loud:
The absence of labels [in ECL] is probably a good thing. -- T. Cheatham
