Dammit; his colleague turned my woosh back on me!

woosh

I've stopped putting a semicolon at the end of code inside Begin..End blocks in all my Pascal programs.

Close, but not quite. They're ok with being recorded while knowing it's happening; they just don't want to know "too hard." Don't talk about it or flaunt it.

If they ask, you can answer "Yes, you're being recorded. I'm recording you, and so are those security cameras over there, there, and .. ah, I remember that guy from the Power to Perverts meeting last week. I don't see his cameras but I know he has a couple. Aha! See his left shoe?"

[Guy from the PtP meeting suddenly turns and stares back, having heard the conversation across the room thanks to the microphones that this discussion is ignoring for now because cameras are more interesting.]

Yes! That's been the known solution all along. People wanted to punch other people for wearing obvious cameras. But wear a hidden camera, and nobody wants to punch you. ATMs and other public cameras usually go unmolested, and they're known.

People really are ok with being watched (they already were watched all the time, long before Google Glass); they just don't want it pointed out to them.

"I don't want to think about it" is our favorite way to get through problems.

Andy Weir hasn't written "The Last Algorithm" yet. This is a text prediction program. It's telling you about the future. Of course it's wrong, right now. Have some patience, people.

We're pretty much spitting in Darwin's face here.

Proudly! You spit in Darwin's face every time you turn on a light bulb or a hot water tap or a car engine or cell phone. Do it early, do it often.

Darwin described how things are, not how you want them to be.

Free market capitalists aren't interested in Comrade Trump's Five Year Plan.

That's my thought. Trump is going to keep telling his employers whatever they ask, and someone (Trump?) has also apparently told all his underlings to make sure they share information too. So what if Hamas One has a microphone behind a panel? The people on board will generally carry newer microphones on their phones, unobstructed by panels. The spyware on their phones can be better maintained and up-to-date, so that if Xi wants someone's meeting to get another 'bcc' added onto it, that can happen.

Against this idea, though: "offense in depth" and the fact that not all adversaries are friendly with one another. While the plane itself will likely report to Qatar, the phones report to someone else, so this is a way to leak to two different foreign parties without those parties having to coordinate with each other.

Maybe Trump shouldn't have to personally whitelist each foreign spy; just let them do their thing without wasting his valuable time. Every time some foreign government buys a few million dollars of his Trump Coin, he or someone on his staff has to manually email them defense documents and that's less time on the golf course. Surely this can be made more efficient, and Hamas One will help with that. Don't make Trump do all the work.

I think from his point of view, Qatar was one of the Bad Guys, but by giving him Hamas One, they have made up for their past transgressions. Bribes settle disputes.

Creating public debate

Ok, then, let's give them what they want.

I'll start. I am an admittedly selfish American. Fuck everyone else. Fuck everyone who isn't me. From that premise, what are the advantages of renaming the gulf? Sure, it's causing some seemingly-unnecessary expense, but that's balanced by ..

...

..uh, sorry, I'm drawing a blank. How can the gulf rename give me an advantage? What is the upside to doing this? If I come out ahead at someone else's expense, that's great. I want to do that. I hope someone else loses and their life gets worse, as long as my life gets better, even if just a tiny bit. But how does my life get better from this? I'm fine if a thousand children are raped and murdered as collateral damage, as long as I get a penny. So where the fuck is my penny?!

Surely, someone has an answer to this.

I'm pro-automation for all jobs, and IRS workers are no exception. If you can automate these jobs, that's great. But whoever is in charge of this is either unintelligent or inexperienced.

In the past when a customer and I automated a job, we did things in a special order that I think would surprise the hell out of Bessent. My big trade secret (should I be leaking this?!) is this:

First, you think about how to do the job. Then you think about what the code should do. Then you write the code, test it, and then have a little trial in production, and see how it goes. Eventually you gain confidence and then finally .. how about that, my customer just removed those positions.

Notice how the word "think" appeared a lot at the beginning of the above schedule, and getting rid of the humans who made sure the job was getting done, came at the very end? My proprietary ordering of these operations is how I got a big advantage. (Yeah, I probably shouldn't be leaking this.)

It turns out that aiming after you fire instead of before, results in a much lower percentage of your shots hitting the target. I wonder if Bissent is traveling backwards in time. That would explain how they got rid of the workers first and now they're nebulously speculating on how they might, some day about a decade from now, create automation to replace the workers they got rid of way back in 2025.

I can imagine.

steal millions of dollars of financial aid

Why are you giving them any money at all, before you even know who they are?

I don't know. In what city should human taxi drivers stop driving because of snow?

If the humans say yes and then kill some of their passengers, and Waymo says no and doesn't kill anyone, then I think Waymo wins some bragging rights. Or at least their liability lawyers would look pretty smug.

Just Say No is an underused strategy, and I'm really just trying to say that as a service, Waymo can use it when they think it's the right one for the moment, whereas someone like Tesla would have a much harder time. Humans drivers have access to that strategy too, but we're usually too stupid to remember, or too stupid to be willing to "puss out." I know, because I am one of those stupid humans, though I haven't killed anyone yet.