The mistake was the Marshall plan.

We should have turned the EU in to dependent agrarian shit-hole.

I wonder if it could be made into an effective non-lethal crowd control / deterrence weapon.

I bet you could get people to vacate an area pretty fast if suddenly the only thing they could smell was the strong sent of decaying flesh or similar. One of those sents that everyone is programed instinctively to move away from.

Don't forget it also super chargers the general asymmetry between attackers and defenders. That is attackers are there for as long as they want to be, defenders have to be their all the time.

Everytime a newer bigger, better trained, whatever model or a new set of tooling, feedback, etc workflow drops defenders have to buy into it and stand it up, and evaluate a whole new wave of potential vulnerabilities that are now identified, and they have to do it before a threat actor does.

Until we reach a point of stability where we not seeing a new frontier offering with significantly enhanced capabilities multiple times a year, team red is going to be better served than team blue.

That is the real problem. There are to many movies. There is just so much low quality stuff cranked out. The movies have outside of a few big legacy francises lost their social aspect.

30 years ago EVERYONE saw the same movies, talked about them got excited about them. There were always tons of marketing tie-ins, every kid went to MCDs and got a batman toy. Now it is all to scattered and silo-ed. Even if you do go the movies none of the guys at work saw it too. There is no social incentive anymore.

Add to that how far even entry level home video has come. Even the folks are not into that stuff at all have a full HD screen that is probably 42" or larger, and are just as likely to have 4K screen in the 55+ size class. Anyone who actually cares even a little can budget for a 60+" 4k display with some basic HRD capability and decidedly ok sound bar. Recreating damn near commercial theater class fidelity is within reach of anyone who does care to spend their money that way.

So it leaves going to the movies with little to offer other than a very expensive night out.

I don't know how you get back there because it would be one of those someone has to unilaterally disarm situations again, but the studios want a theater channel they actually need to get back to each doing a like one jaw dropping summer block buster a year, they market the crap out of and supplementing with the art-house, horror, childrens releases. They need to tell us what movies to see and why we want to pay $20 just to get thru the door rather than simply waiting a few months and watching at home if we even bother.

yes and the other element of this that people who don't work for/with/at/in/against organizations that play this game is the repeat business aspect.

A politician more or less agrees to stake out a position as a service and perhaps introduce some legislative language the company helped draft. In addition to the direct donation the lobby group will pass money through a network of related entities to first propogandize the recipients district that whatever is actually an issue worth considering at the voting booth, and shortly after what they should think about. Now our politician has something to run on, how they are for or against X while their opponent gets painted as the opposite and their campaign is forced to stop and determine what their messaging even should be on the subject for several days while they get hammer, and painted as evasive if they won't answer questions.

If you pay attention at state level races you see this dynamic a lot, and you'll see it in federal House and Senate races as well in any media the campaigns are aiming at voters who are not already solidly team blue, team red, or committed based on of our marquee issues abortion, guns, income taxes, health care. Which is a increasingly tiny slice of the public, so if you are just watching national media you don't see a lot of this in the past elections but it is still very much there if you pick up your towns local rag.

Getting back the repeat business thing, the lobby groups and corporate contributors remember who played ball and got it done. They want to work with that person again if they can, so the incentive as politician then if you don't personally care a great deal about a given issue is to get things done. You want to be seen as a reliable partner, so the money keeps flowing your way. The best part is you can lie to everyone including yourself about it and say it is all just representing your constituents.

Of course it is really the tail wagging the dog. Its about telling people want what the big players want first then delivering that. This why the whole idea everyone should vote is really messed up. Companies trod out celebrities to propagandize people to do that too, for a reason they want the most easily propagandized people voting so they can use their propaganda power to create opportunities for their political puppets. They have a large part of the public conditioned to think voting is some kind of civic duty, but knowing anything about the topics you are actually voting on beyond if they are 'red' or 'blue' isnt ever mentioned... ^^This is why that is.

Heh, I think if the money was ending up in the pockets of the providers people would have lot less issue with the direction US healthcare is going. The money is ending up in the pockets of the administrators, HMOs, insurers (both health, and malpractice), litigators, and recipients of political donations.

A former president has every reason to lie. He is not free to share classified information, nor in a position to declassify it.

I think the idea that aliens have (other than perhaps those composed of smallish numbers of cells that perhaps hitched a ride on some meteor) having come to earth is pure fantasy.

However I would consider any former office holder or ranking military officer about the least reliable source on something like that. Even if they had been in a position to know, they'd be the most closely watched and among those the government is most able to discreetly coerce/blackmail if they step out of line.

Now maybe a death bed revelation one way or the other where they have nothing left to lose could be believed.

Because otherwise you could easily tell it is just a photo of a pie plate.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... [Kids in the Hall]

It is still funny all these years later.

Imagine you are a manager or a CO and you have an employee who keeps spending an enormous amount of time working one something you know is pointless.

You'd tell them to find a more productive use of their time, and if they can't you might tell them to find other employment.

If you stalker needs face recognition to identify you; are they stalking you at all? That one does not even really make sense.

Law enforcement too already has cameras all over the darn place. I kinda don't see the threat there either, at least not beyond the one that already is present. We post wanted posters for a reason, precisely because we want to deny know criminals and suspects privacy in public.

There are lot of reasons to be concerned about Meta putting face recognition on these things, but honestly the wearer being able to attach a name to whoever they are looking at is the least of the issues as I see it. My concern is that this thing is going to be sending the biometrics and presumable the location back to meta for processing. It leaves Meta with not just 'I am looking at William Taft" but if enough people wear the glass a giant database of exactly where half the country was and when.

Oh for sure, Maine has been on that trajectory for decades. Every since they embraced that "Maine Vacation Land" slogan at the state level.

The traditional industry (fishing, forest products, garment manufacturer, maritime construction) are being displaced. Garments are basically gone. Fishing, maritime construction / maintenance, forest products are learning to adapt mix and embrace tourism, to the extent they are surviving, it isn't just 'Bar Harbor' any more.

Maine is a gentrifying in a big way. Honestly it has to because its population is also aging, it had, I think still has the oldest population in the states. For so long there were no opportunities for young folks they all left. Automation and mechanization meant there wast room for people move continue in Dad's line of work.

So they have built this coastal tourism industry, and they'd really like to expand that to the interior of the state (and have been succeeding) but it is understandable they feel the need to be careful about letting people throw up to many sheet metal clad warehouses with noisy generators all over the place. Diversification is probably seen as smart, but not if kill what is proving to be the golden goose.

What Maine does have (at least inland) is a lot of low cost real-estate, not the timber and pulp industries are insignificant but they own most of it and I am sure they'd love the opportunity to sell a few hundred acres for a onetime 100x multiple of their 'crop yield'.

The other part of this is 'data centers' need to be very well connected, but do 'compute centers'? While that historically has been a distinction without a different, maybe it does not have to be.

Be it for training (bulk data delivered infrequently) or even handling LLM and similar AI queries that will be delivered over http-streaming responses handled by JavaScript layers on both the front and backend.. sub ms latency is hardly a concern, a lot of commercial AI stuff like bedrock could probably be hosted in places not as well connected as we have come to expect modern hosting facilities to be. I am not saying they can do this without stringing fiber out to where everything the facility is or anything like that, but that if it is a couple three more routing hops as compared to 'traditional hosting' that might not be a problem.

Real talk - If you work at a public company and you don't have a seat in the boardroom complete with name plaque, you might well be laid off at any moment, for just about any reason. There is no corporate loyalty any more.

So should anyone in that sort of organization, ever think past the time-span involving their next bonus? People have long accused C[X]Os of not looking past the quarterly earnings report, or past their next bonus, but maybe the rest of the workforce just needs to get memo that you either have a significant ownership stake or you don't and if you don't then it is about getting the most comp you can as quickly as you can, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

Yes, that was the point.