Honestly bad article. Author can’t even accurately describe the thing they claim doesn’t exist.

excludes droughts and heatwaves

Those seem important

I like people in theory

The above poster at least brought a reference. Here’s another covering the backfire effect in general https://psychotricks.com/backfire-effect/

People are a tricky problem. They don’t often work the way one would think, and certainly not the way we might wish. I think it’s a fair position to take that the social media environment, and the way people with opposing views interact there, has had a non-negligible impact on the rise in extreme views. That definitely includes trolling.

But here I am offering a differing opinion with a reference in support of the backfire effect, which is some next-level irony.

I tend to consider the two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence. The definition of statecraft as the act of managing capital is a formulation I have not heard before, and doesn’t strike me as persuasive. It seems to have strange implications, like that Goldman Sachs is a state.

Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states. Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions. The necessity of institutions in this case seems an easier argument.

The answers to these kinds of issues is never disclosures or ToS or admin vigilance. It’s always technical. Everything which is technically possible will become normal.

Lemmy is not popular because it is a well designed piece of technology. Frankly it’s a pretty naive implementation of activitypub. It’s popularity comes from being the biggest alternative around when Reddit pissed off a good chunk of its users.

The only way to control how data is used, is to make it technically or practically impossible to do so. Until then, expect all the data on the fediverse to be used in every way possible for any purpose, and act accordingly.

I guess if you wanna go off at people like that, I have to go through your links and point out that

1. Providing services to a cyber warfare organization does not make one a cyber warfare company. I bet they contract out their cafeteria services too. The article specifically states the contract is for data analysis.
2. Doing data analysis for target selection also does not make one a cyber warfare company.
3. Data analysis is not cryptography. Also, my personal computer is encrypted. Am I a cryptographer?
4. Receiving data from your customers does not make you a data collection company, and the article points out that the data is being collected by Oura. Compare that with the NSA who for example have internet backbone splitters installed at the major telcos, or put cell spoofers in cities.

Why is doing data analysis for unethical ends not enough?

Palantir is a data analysis company. Data analysis is just one part of what the NSA does. Other important functions of the NSA include cyber warfare, cryptography, and data collection. I have not read that Palantir does any of that.

If different people with similar visual characteristics have similar behavioral characteristics, doesn’t that imply that perhaps we can judge a book by its cover?

Haven’t read the book, but the title suggests things could have been different. That something happened to make things bad. If that’s the argument, it is completely wrong. Israel could have turned out no other way. Extermination is the only possible outcome of a colonial ethno-state.

Imagine explaining to a patient they have permanent neurological damage because they wanted to sniff their video games.

Yeah I can’t believe this is still around. It was a beast to work with like a decade ago, and it kinda looks exactly the same. Surely there are some smooth phone or web apps that do this better now.

I have a hard time believing that Gore would have made a difference on preventing 9-11, but I’m sure the response would have been different. Maybe no Patriot Act, maybe no Afghanistan War, almost certainly no Iraq War. That’s a big enough difference for me.

Tactical assault Torah

Sounds like a play for protectionism.

I’m used to AP titles being pretty dry, but they have started putting some bite in them.

Sounds like the next year or two may be a good time to finally get a battery for my panels

I’m having a conversation with a family member. Somehow the topic of firefighters comes up. She pauses, looks very thoughtful for a moment, then asks, “Do you not like firefighters, either?”

“What? Why would I not like firefighters?”

“Like how you don’t like police.”

She knows me well. I boggle at how my distaste for cops could be this misunderstood.

The Trump admin have been filling US attorneys offices with temporary appointments, and attempting to leave those temporary appointments in place indefinitely. This is an attempt to avoid the constitutional requirement that US attorneys be approved by the Senate.

Courts have recently ruled that this is illegal, and that some of the people currently attempting to exercise the powers of a US attorney have no such legal authority. Ms. Habba is an example of one such person.

The law allows the courts to appoint US attorneys if the position has been vacant for some period. Some courts have chosen to do so, I believe in the case of Ms. Habba specifically, and the Trump administration have immediately fired the court appointed US attorneys. I believe after firing the court appointed US attorney, they attempted to make another temporary appointment, which the law does not allow, but were hoping to muddle the issue by appointing three people as a “triumvirate.”

The courts subsequently ruled that that is also illegal, but it sounds like the ruling judged stayed their order to allow for appeals.

This judge in the transcript is attempting to discover whether the prosecutor attempting to participate in this plea deal and sentencing hearing have any legal authority to do so. It sounds like the hearing was supposed to resolve these matters of fact, but the attorney present wasn’t able to say anything about who is actually running the US attorneys office.

Consequently, the judge has indicated that they will be summoning the “triumvirate” to testify in person, under oath to determine who is really running the US attorney office.

IANAL and this is all from memory of previous reporting I’ve read. Do fact check if you’re interested.

I think it kinda doesn’t matter. If they can catch 95% of all users, that’s pretty close to total victory. Well more than enough to shut out access from Linux systems for most things without causing public backlash.