If you ask to see their badge and they show you a metal one it's probably a scammer, most real cops these days carry the plastic ones you can get at a Halloween store because budget cuts. IANAL etc etc
I agree with you, but every reason you just listed is a positive from the perspective of their customers.
I think it's practically guaranteed that Palantir is, or will be, blackmailing officials. Even if they never do, any lucid official will be very conscious of stepping on the toes of a private intelligence company.
Or they can go the other direction and offer foreign powers protection for money.
The incentives are aligned that way so it would require surveillance and conspiracy to prevent it from happening.
Furthermore, collecting large amounts of information on your own population creates a lowest effort point of entry for an adversary to gather that info, and it's more useful to them.
This would be a cool project for a Uni Humanities Department and would lend some credibility to the finished product. Get them rolling with some basic infra; a site, wiki, bugtracker and git repo.
The documentary with him saving his father's writings and such was one of the saddest things I've seen - that moment has stuck with me for years.
I suppose the people who will be paying for such a service will be the loved ones left behind, not the one's dying. I wonder if the doppelgangers will start to talk to each other in the graveyard in the middle of the night?
That's a 60° F HDD. Unfortunately, the HDD for the US tend to be based on 65° F. San Francisco has a mean of close enough to 3000 over 1948 - 2013 (it's probably lower now).
As these are temperature degrees, to convert from HDD 16 to HDD 65 (and ignoring that its 60 vs 65), that's 1310 * 9/5 that's 2358.
Ballpark, it needs less heating than San Francisco... though there's the "it's a castle and not well insulated" and "that's a large volume". However, it's not as big of an undertaking as one would imagine (to heat a castle) in a mediterranean climate.
I'd compare it to heating a church in San Francisco. Again, ballpark estimates put this in $1.00 - $1.50 per square foot.
> Kettle Moraine Heating & Air Conditioning installed solar panels designed to work with the brand-new Lennox systems and appliances used throughout the house. Now the owner—who bought the 10,000-square-foot historic home and updated the property with a 5,000-square-foot addition with help from Kettle Moraine—is saving a whopping $3,000 in electricity costs per year thanks to solar energy. And they’re pleased with the whole HVAC overhaul and new installation.
Well the Illuminati wouldn't be using something you could crack, unless they wanted you to think that you had cracked something, which may or may not have been made so you think that it was or wasn't the Illuminati.
If there's the will, we can make such agreements unenforceable. Recognizing their danger, we can even make the mere presence of such a clause in a contract illegal, punishable by a large payment to whoever reports the clause.
Plenty of laws prevent certain rights from being relinquished by contract. For example California employment law prevents employers from controlling what you work on in your spare time on personal equipment, with few exceptions.
I have had friends at Apple, Facebook, and Google question whether they could work on open source projects on the side and I highlighted this for them.
Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source.
> Note that employers often still put unenforceable restrictions on these things in their contact which I think sucks. It confuses employees who don’t know their rights and chills valuable work on open source.
This is a big reason why I think clauses in contracts with individuals should not be separable. The entire agreement is either valid or not, you can't stuff it full of a tenuous wishlist of rights.
Lawyers are far too expensive to ask every citizen to hire one every time they want to find out which clauses are blatantly unenforceable.
Maybe it made sense when the sum of laws that apply to everyone was a reasonable quantity, but at this point even lawyers only really know the parts they specialize in.
There have to be millions of pages by the time you include all the case law that set precedent.
I might be in favor of such a requirement if it only applied to larger organizations. Otherwise regular people would have to hire lawyers all the time even to write up a simple contract. If a company employs more than 500 people or makes more than $10m per year in revenue its employment contracts must not contain unenforceable sections, for example.
Even then I might want to keep the scope narrowly to employment contracts. A contract between two large companies would have wider implications if it could be invalidated completely.
My understanding is that contract law is nuanced and it is important for the functioning of society that small mistakes can be fixed without major repercussions, but I am in favor or making sure large employers aren’t misleading employees.
> I might be in favor of such a requirement if it only applied to larger organizations. Otherwise regular people would have to hire lawyers all the time even to write up a simple contract. If a company employs more than 500 people or makes more than $10m per year in revenue its employment contracts must not contain unenforceable sections, for example.
I presume, perhaps incorrectly, that an industry would spring up around "standardized contracts" offered for very cheap/free. Seems like something Intuit might offer for free as a hook to get you on the platform.
Individuals would also likely use standardized contracts when dealing with other individuals, ideally. I would be okay with exempting them, but I really do think there benefits to centralizing on some standardized contracts. We could do something like what GitHub does when you look at licenses and it tells you what the license grants and denies. You could probably get specific case law for questions, because there are a lot of cases using the exact same contract.
I think it's typically (though not always) an anti-pattern for two individuals to write their own contract. I do not want my landscaper to write his own contract, which I then have to make sure I understand correctly. I'd much rather get "Standardized Lawn Care Contract V2 /w Owner Liability Option" and be able to find an infographic that summarizes who has what responsibility, up to what amounts, etc, etc.
> Even then I might want to keep the scope narrowly to employment contracts. A contract between two large companies would have wider implications if it could be invalidated completely.
I specifically limited it to contracts between individuals because I think having lawyers at-hand is a fair expectation of companies. They have enough resources to find out what's enforceable and what isn't, and B2B contracts would typically be for amounts where hiring a lawyer doesn't erase all the gain from the transaction.
You find out your contract has an invalid clause. What now? Contract null and void and you pay back all the wages received? Or just stop being employed from that moment forward?
Apologies, I never thought you were disingenuous, it's just a busy time of year :)
In that circumstance, if both parties are still happy with the terms they would presumably sign a new contract minus the unenforceable terms.
If the company opts not to create a new contract, I would say it counts as firing the person without cause.
It is an interesting question though, especially as it pertains to future incentives. Something like the person having earned a bonus that hasn't been paid out yet, the contract is found invalid so the bonus part is scratched out.
Perhaps the individual deserves a choice in that case, whether to proceed without a contract or under the terms minus the unenforceable parts, or maybe something more punitive to the company like the individual keeping any rights they got and the company losing theirs.
I still think it's a workable idea, but you do raise an interesting point that's probably worth adjusting my idea around.
If you have a wristwatch with hands you may not want to identify the exact minute (this can be a little difficult if it has a smaller face), but if it's 5 minutes either way then a "quarter-to" is close enough.
When I was in college, it was a thing for students to design and build a digital LED clock out of random logic. A friend of mine wanted to make one that would tell time only in 15 minute chunks, as nobody needed more precise time than that.
Yes, I did a digital clock, too, my first digital design/build. It never did work right.
The rumors in Aviation Leak were that (one of the) Arora was an external burn (not RDL) unmanned aircraft around Mach 5-6. The "skyquakes" described here set off the local seismometers at regular intervals (eg 7am monday and wednesday), which doesn't normally happen. By looking at the parabolas (conic shockwave intersection with earth) of the arrival at an array of seismometers one could estimate the angle of the shockwave (Mach) and the angle relative the surface (attack angle). My memory is that it was accelerating Mach 3-5 at an angle over 45 deg.
