Per Delta, the AI pricing isn't individualized, meaning all customers buying the same class of service at a given time will see the same price, so I don't think that would get you anything, unless maybe your AI agent gets good at predicting when exactly you should buy your ticket, but that seems unlikely because your agent will always be operating with less information than theirs (e.g., yours doesn't know exactly how many seats are already sold).

I find that it works well to treat current-generation AI agents like bright, incredibly fast but overenthusiastic and incautious junior engineers who do not learn from their mistakes. They can be extremely useful, but you have to be careful to limit the damage they can do if they happen to screw up.

I don't think anyone struggling to afford health insurance -- especially now that insurance can't deny pre-existing conditions -- is shelling out $20k for bleach injections. It would be much cheaper to get an individual healthcare policy and get it to pay for proper chemo.

Nah. Transactional implies a level of coherence and planning that is clearly absent in the current administration.

As an American, I'd be doing the same if I were in your shoes.

It's a hard answer. By stating "You will categorically not be paid if you try to ransom us", you're cutting out the part of organised crime that does stuff for a profit. There will be no profit in attacking a hospital. They will not pay, and you'll take an awful lot of heat for no return (and potentially be liable for any deaths that occur if they eventually catch you, increasing the sentence that's meted out to you).

However, there is still the vulnerability to politically motivated attacks, so safety still isn't assured, it just demotivates regular organised crime that just wants to make lots of money.

Having backups, and having tested backups is pretty much what everyone has.
The critical thing that people are finding is the metric to follow with Ransomware attacks is the Recovery Time for the entire estate. Not one system, but potentially hundreds of interlinked systems that all fail catastrophically at once.
That can take weeks of forensics to work out what's happened (and needs to be done before you can make an effective recovery, otherwise you may find you're back at still being compromised and ransom attacked within minutes of being back online). Then it can take weeks or months to recover and sync all the systems affected.

All the while, your primary business (in hospitals, for example, keeping people alive) is in measures that most likely can't handle the load long term with paper based recording and tracking. They certainly will have difficulty managing planned appointments and making new ones, which is why many business continuity plans have a time scale by which a given system needs to be recovered, or else things go south quickly after that period.

I notice you didn't say "a good reason" -- for good reason.

Moreover, Chris Mattern's implication is that he thinks Google might somehow backdoor their reproducibly-rebuilt packages. Even if he thinks Google engineers are evil, does he really believe they're stupid? It would be impossible without someone noticing and crying foul.

Google's security efforts provide a lot of value to the world, for no direct financial gain to Google. Things like Project Zero, Certificate Transparency and OSS Rebuild make the computing world better and safer. In this case, I suspect that it's something that Google wanted to do for its own purposes, to make its own systems more secure, and someone pointed out that for negligible additional cost they could make the tools and data public. You may dislike Google's business model (though the people who complain about it never seem to be able to propose any alternative for funding the web), but the fact is that Google is really good at security, and does a lot for the security of global computing.

I'm not sure you could identify specific, actionable damage even if it were intentional, and I doubt you could prove it's intentional. Odds are that if you dug into it you'd find that they're true believers in the crap they're spouting, and you definitely can't prosecute them for wrongthink.

I've read so many people saying "should have had backups", but nobody has considered the time to rebuild from catastrophic failure. Every system and server is down, full restore and recovery to a time before infection (and validation of that).
The company was a transport company with 500 trucks on the road. That's a lot of logistics in play that need to have continuity, each one with cost of probably tens of thousands a day, or more, with heavy non-complete penalties for failure.
Full catastrophic failure can take weeks, or months to perform. In this time, you've haemorrhaged customers, who have had to try and make alternate arrangements where they can (and will likely not be back), no ability to schedule new business, and bills that still need to be paid.

The cash flow can easily drive a low margin business like transport into failure just by the time to recover from a complete loss of function by malicious infection. All the backups may be there, they may even have off site, and have done everything by the book, just the operating company as an entity could easily lose more in the recovery time window than it was possible to financially recover from.

It's how basically everything else works. Provide the product desired and you make money -- and people get what they want to buy. The core point, though, is that it's silly to worry about who is going to get rich. Just make sure the market is competitive, then see who can compete the best. This particular market is a bit hamstrung by regulations, but diversifying the supplier sources should actually help to ease the effect of that a bit.

How would out of state "pirates" manipulate the CA market? If the pirates want to charge more for electricity than it costs locally, use the local power. If they're offering it for less (which is likely the case, since everywhere around CA has cheaper power than CA does), then buy it.

This seems like nothing but a win for CA residents. The residents of other states in the area might not fare so well, since their own generation companies will prefer to sell to CA for the higher prices available there.

Except in this case the answer is clearly "yes". Connect the grids as far and wide as possible, and let market forces drive production up and costs down. The argument that "but then Californians might sometimes be using dirty power from coal plants in Nevada" is just stupid, because while that might happen sometimes, it also means that people in other states will use more of CA's renewable power.

What matters isn't who uses which, but that we maximize the total use of renewables and minimize the total use of fossil fuels. Given that renewables are dramatically cheaper than fossil energy, this means that just letting the market work will move us in the right direction. Broad interconnection and competitive markets will serve to ensure that the cheapest and greenest energy sources are 100% used and never wasted, not until the whole western US has enough renewables that renewable output sometimes exceeds the consumption of the entire region. It will further encourage deployment of more and more super-cheap renewables, driving fossil energy gradually out of the market.

Note that it's also important that wholesale prices not be tightly regulated, that the market be free to seek proper price equilibrium. Why? Because it's important that it be possible for, say, gas peaker plants to be able to make an absolute killing in the rare cases that available renewables fall short, so that power companies are motivated to operate and maintain those plants -- or to replace them with energy storage systems (battery, pumped hydro, whatever) so that those can make a killing when they're needed.

If at some point we fall into a local minimum where the market isn't incentivizing the shift to renewables + storage, then it will make sense to find some way to intervene with regulation. But, again, the best strategy will be to harness the market. For example, just internalize the carbon emission externality by applying a carbon tax, then let the market work out the power balance -- which could even include fossil fuel plants with carbon capture systems, who knows? At the present, though, costs favor renewables even with the carbon externalities of fossil plants.

Whoever can provide the most power at the lowest price at the times it's needed.