We need cameras and microphones set up outside their homes, livestreaming everything constantly. We need to follow them wherever they go and post audio/video/stills from that too, along with their exact locations. We need to run facial recognition on them and everyone they encounter. We need to do everything possible to ensure that they have absolutely no privacy, ever. This includes the children because, after all, they're doing it to our children -- why should theirs be exempt?

This is what Flock is doing to us; it's only fair to return the favor.

I see: decades of work in the field, a lot of successful rescues and some unsuccessful ones, plus the study and practice required to become a certified instructor, means that I'm..."short-sighted".

I'm fully aware of the multiple ways that people evacuated (or didn't) during Sandy. Not all of them made the best possible choices because they were scared, confused, or uninformed. Not all of them could make the best possible choices because they were old, disabled, or trapped by circumstances. For example, some of them chose to try to evacuate by car in places where that was impossible because streets were flooded. You and I and everyone else can sit in here in our nice dry, warm, comfortable chairs and criticize that; it's easy. It's very different when you're standing in waist-deep water for hours trying to get panicked people to stop before they make their predicament worse.

One of things that we do following every response is a debrief. We analyze it and ask ourselves what we got right and what we got wrong. No rescue is ever perfect, unfortunately; all we can do is try to do the next one better than the previous one. And one of the consistent conclusions from hundreds of these is that communication is both imperfect and essential. We need to use every possible means, with a strong preference for the ones that will keep working as conditions deteriorate over minutes/hours/days. An AM radio in every vehicle is one component of that; obviously it's not the only one, we'd be delighted if everybody had a couple of cheap battery/crank/solar powered emergency radios in their homes. (We'd also be delighted if everyone had plain old POTS, because it's far more robust than cable/fiber/wireless.) But we have work with what we have, not with what we wish we had.

(I'm no longer in the field very often, but I train the people who are.)

The negligible expense of AM radio in every vehicle is an investment that's paid back in lives saved. I'll give you an example and presume that you can extrapolate to other events.

When Sandy hit, it took out all kinds of communications. (Cellular networks are particularly vulnerable to this because backup power supply systems are only designed to run briefly and because the towers fall in hurricanes/tornados/derechos/etc.) Even local radio stations -- yes, including AM stations -- were knocked off the air by the event. But non-local radio stations that could be received in the affected area stayed on the air, and when we asked WLS-AM (mentioned in this story) and other stations (e.g. KMOX-AM) to broadcast evacuation instructions, they did. And some people heard those broadcasts, which I know because I was there and asked them how they knew to come to the evac staging zones we'd set up.

That's the thing about AM radio: because powerful stations can be heard hundreds of miles away on cheap gear, they constitute a communications channel that is likely to be keep working even when everything else is down or severely impaired. It's dirt-cheap insurance, and the feeble excuse from EV vendors that it causes interference is absolutely bullshit: we figured out how to solve that problem a long time ago. Their real reason is that want people to depend solely on communication channels that they control, even if they know full well that they'll fail in emergencies, and they don't care how many people die as a consequence.

Nobody can march down the street and burn them down.

The fascist oligarchs behind the AI/data center scam know that the public hates these and that eventually, it will occur to someone to torch one of them. That's not going to be so easy if they're in orbit.

This has nothing to do with research or innovation or anything else: it's pure self-preservation.

Billionaires have decided, either explicitly or implicitly, that they can survive a dying planet and therefore all the rest of us are expendable. They're building climate-proof riot-proof bunkers, they're funding life extension research, they're funding cloning research, they're doing everything they can to ensure their survival (in one form or another) while also doing everything they can to accelerate the end of everyone else.

It's sad that it's come to this, but: either they all go or we all go. I don't like it, I wish things weren't this way, but this is where we find ourselves and the only remaining question is how far we'll let things go -- and how many of us will die -- before we decide to act.

My guess is that it will take some kind of unfortunate, awful, cataclysmic event to finally get people to act. I say that because we've been watching gradual and inexorable events for decades and we're done nothing: it's just business as usual. So I suspect a mass tragedy will be necessary to galvanize the population into doing what needs to be done.

""Fifty sites seized and 150 domains disabled in a single action is only possible when the hosting providers, the exchanges, the model providers and the data holders all move at the same time," security company SpyCloud told The Hacker News."

That's nice. But how was this facilitated in the first place? (1) Domain registrars who will sell scammers as many domains as they want. (2) Hosting providers who will host obvious phishers/scammers/typosquatters as long as they pay the bills (3) Cryptocurrency operations, aka fake money for criminals. (4) AI companies who have utterly failed to building even pretend guardrails because they don't care how much damage they cause (4) &etc.

What we have here are the people who set the house on fire taking credit for belatedly putting it out.

I've been designing, building, and running email systems for a very long time. And one of the things I've observed is that it is impossible to secure any email system running on Microsoft platforms. I've watched colleagues -- sincere, smart, dedicated, hardworking, diligent colleagues -- try over and over and over again...and all of them have failed. ALL OF THEM. Not even Microsoft, which has for all practical purposes infinite money and infinite personnel, has managed to pull it off. Given this 100% failure rate, I'm convinced that it can't be done.

Not that other operations don't have their issues: Gmail is overrun with spammers and phishers, for example. But those might be fixed given some attention by the right people. Microsoft will never be fixed.

This.

Minimizing civilian casualties is of course always important if you want to even pretend to be a civilized country. But in this case it was, and I'm using the past tense there on purpose, even more important. Before the US started this war, Iran had an aging, sickly, increasingly-unpopular leader who probably would have been dead in a few years from natural causes. But as long as he remained alive and in power, he was a focal point for Iranian dissidents, and if the goal really was to encourage those dissidents, then he should have been left exactly where he was. But the US killed him, an enormous mistake -- because then he became a martyr. And then made an even worse mistake by killing over a hundred schoolchildren, because Hegseth et.al. cut staff in a critical area. Which means that even the dissidents, and the people who might be inclined to support them, now have a greater evil to focus on: the US. Any chance of the US fomenting a popular uprising resulting in regime change disappeared in that moment. That wasn't merely an enormous mistake, it was a catastrophic blunder -- and the consequences are going to last a long time.

So as a human being, I'm appalled by this completely avoidable tragedy. As a strategic thinker (I hope) I'm convinced that it will have dire consequences for the future.

The perverts and thugs buying/using these aren't using them for some benign reason; they're using them to invade the privacy of anyone they can, any way they can. That statement shouldn't surprise anyone: it's why these were designed, built, and marketed. They're explicitly intended to appeal to people just like Mark Zuckerberg: misogynists, psychopaths, sociopaths -- in other words, he's marketing to his peers. And predictably: it's working.

What comes next? The nonconsensual AI-constructed nudes, the stalking, the harassment, the extortion, the exploitation, everything that inevitably follows when some of the very worst people in the world are handed a powerful tool that they can readily use for whatever purpose they wish. To Zuck, these outcomes aren't problems to be solved; they're valid use cases to be supported and encouraged. They're the entire reason why he did this: he doesn't have to go out and be the creep if he has a willing army of creeps ready to do it for him.

"Were his posts always like this?"

It appears to me that this is a serious question, so I'm going to give a serious answer: yes.

This is how he's always written (and spoken), although arguably it's gotten worse in the past few years as his dementia progresses. The press -- right, left, and center -- has unfortunately whitewashed much of this by often not quoting him unredacted or by paraphrasing what he's written/said in order to make it intelligible. If you actually listen to him, word for word, and read him, word for word, it's obvious in minutes that he's not only an incredibly stupid and uneducated man, but that what's left of his mind is deteriorating rapidly.

Keep in mind that Trump was born into an organized crime family, was raised to be a mobster, and built his entire "career" on fraud. At every point it was always about him and only about him: he doesn't care about anyone or anything else. He was able to conceal that -- to a certain extent -- for a long time, but now that he's losing his mind, the mask is off. He's been reduced to a toddler, who only wants ME ME ME. Except in this case, he's willing to destroy the US in order to get it, and US adversaries have quite adeptly leveraged that. Both the Iranians and North Koreans have made him their dancing puppet, for example.

So to circle back to your question and answer it another way: he writes like a scammer because he is a scammer.

"What is wrong with the Republican party?"

There is no Republican party. Not any more. It's been replaced with a death cult. (If you think that's an exaggeration, then I invite to pull up every piece of GOP-initiated legislation in Congress for the last quarter century and consider its goal(s). You will find that -- with precious few exceptions -- all of it is intended to kill as many people as possible. Whether it's cutting funding for anti-hunger programs, or for medical care, or for housing, or gutting environmental regulations so that industry can destroyer the planet faster, almost every piece of legislation is explicitly designed as an instrument of mass murder.)

Barry Goldwater - who I sharply disagreed with but have to admit was usually rational - saw this coming over half a century ago: "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

These people are of course completely insane: but they're insane people who wield enormous power. They believe that they're bringing about the "End Times" and that doing so justifies anything/everything they do, no matter how vicious and inhumane. And so they're doing everything possible to bring about not merely the end of the US, but the end of humanity -- including their own children.

There's no reasoning with these people. They're impervious to it. There's no appealing to conscience or ethics or morality; they're convinced that they're doing the will of god and that doing so justifies anything. The only thing left is stopping them by any means necessary, and the only question left is how long and how far we're going to allow things to go before we finally do the things we need to do.

What I mean by the Subject is that this has made headlines, and of course it should, because the consequences that fortunately didn't happen would have been horrendous.

But meanwhile, quietly and largely unnoticed, AI/LLM/big date/whatever is being used to kill people in far less attention-grabbing ways. Medical insurance claims are being denied; housing loans are being declined; and so on. Things that affect folks' lives are being increasingly delegated to systems that are badly flawed because doing so increases profits and/or suits someone's political/social/economic agenda. The resulting body count isn't a bug; it's a feature. But because it all happens without much fuss, it doesn't make headlines.

The AI-becomes-superintelligent-and-kills-us-all doomsaying is a distraction from this, because this is already happening every day all around us. But because it happens quietly and privately, it isn't front-page news. It isn't news at all. It just...is. And that is why it's truly dangerous: it's not a highly visible large threat, it's just background noise.

Until it's you.

First, because it's an extraordinary book: well-researched, beautifully written, cohesive, and enlightening.

Second, because it's applicable here. Briefly: neuroplasticity is a thing: our brains can and do actively change themselves in order to handle the cognitive tasks we ask them to perform. They do this surprising rapidly, and they do so in adults, not just children. So -- for example -- while we no longer ask students to memorize very long poems, that doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to do so. (After all, our brains evolved over a very long time. They're not going to un-evolve in just a few hundred years.) The same is true of mathematical reasoning, rhetorical analysis, spatial reasoning, and everything else. Children today are just as capable of doing these things as children 20 or 50 or 200 years ago.

However, the learning, social, cultural, and economic environment around those children has changed. The lives of many of them are incredibly stressful, and it's not reasonable to ask anyone, let alone a child, to be good at learning under such adverse conditions. To put it another way: if you want better educational outcomes, then ensure that every kid has a stable home, medical care, good food, all the essentials required to provide the environment in which it's possible for them to learn. If you do that, then their brains will adapt to the tasks in front of them. But of course in many countries, including the US, national policy is do the exact opposite of this -- the product of decades of Republican work to undercut education at all levels, because literate, educated people are their enemies.

It's happening right now, as you're reading this: kids need clean air, so EPA regulations have been gutted. Kids need vaccinations, to anti-vax lunatics are being pushed. Kids need libraries, so their funding is being cut. Kids need hope for the future, so the economy's being wrecked. Kids need a safe environment, so global warming is being accelerated at every opportunity. Kids need safety, so pro-gun advocates want mass shootings every day, preferably in schools. Kids need available parents, so they're being forced to work two or three jobs. Kids need stability, so national leaders are whipsawing policy around on almost an hourly basis. Kids need peace, so pointless wars are being started. Kids need hope, and it's being systematically taken away from them.

Instead they're being offered lives of misery, working forever as the vassals of the feudal lords of tech. So of course they're not learning: how could they? Why should they? And it's not their fault: it's ours.

Good analysis. I'll add the price of crude continues to increase because the cost of shipping continues to rise quite rapidly. Insurance fees have gone through the roof, fuel costs are up, some ships are being rerouted all the around Africa with commensurate costs. The Saudis' east-west pipeline is out of commission for an indeterminate period. And now that the Houthi control the southern entrance to the Red Sea, all it will take is a couple of potshots at passing ships to exacerbate all of this further. All because Trump couldn't stand the idea that a black President had negotiated a working (imperfectly, but working) deal with Iran that kept everything manageable and because he's surrounded himself with sycophants who are just as ignorant of asymmetric warfare as he is.

1. It's not ethical anywhere that two-party consent is required, because Meta will make a recording of it and retain it.

2. Deaf people have gotten along and will get along just fine without Zuck's pervert glasses. Lip-reading and sign language almost always suffice, and on the few occasions where they don't, a scribbled note works.

3. If there was the slightest intention of creating these in order to help out the Deaf community, then (a) the Deaf community would have been consulted up-front (b) and asked "do you actually want/need something like this?" (c) the design and implementation would be very different (d) a consent mechanism would have been built-in and mandatory (e) there would be no recordings. This is an after-the-fact attempt to justify a device that was conceived by a misogynist who absolutely hates women with every fiber of his being -- something we've known since he was in college -- so that he can abuse and victimize them vicariously, and then blame the users of these devices, the very people he purposefully enabled.