I have a few 'conspiracy' theories on this that go from likely to sci-fi.
My two big ones for this would be
1. They do monitor the AIs attempting to hack but for different reasons than you expect. Instead of making models that don't hack they are trying to build the most efficient hackers in the world and sell this capabilities to governments for billions. Because of this they generate terabytes of hack attempt logs and agent history doing this hacking. So when a new model came out with better abilities what they were looking at changed and they didn't realize it. They were already numb to alarms and missed when the danger occurred.
2. Like the above, they generate terabytes of logs per day. Because there is so much data AI filters and monitors almost all of it flagging things that a human should review. But for some reason this model didn't set off those flags. The protection model classified this behavior as perfectly safe.
Number 2 sounds kind of like a sci-fi conspiracy but it seems that almost all models judge content generated by the same model or family of models as 'better'. It's predicted that models in a judging context could allow things to slip by as an emergent behavior of reading the text.
I am very curious how many MCP servers will actually implement all of this:
"MCP authorization today is built around a person approving access in a browser. That works well for interactive clients, but more and more of the callers are agents running as cloud workloads with their own identity, acting on behalf of a user who isn’t present, or delegating narrower authority to sub-agents. We want MCP servers to have a standardized way to recognize and trust those agent identities, built on existing standards rather than pasted API keys and long-lived tokens.
The work here covers finalizing Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) and driving its adoption, and defining an opinionated path for agent identity and delegation through Workload Identity Federation, the ID-JAG grant behind Enterprise-Managed Authorization, and standard token exchange. We will also continue to grow our engagement with the OAuth standards bodies, including the IETF OAuth and WIMSE working groups, to help the underlying standards evolve with the building blocks that agent identity needs."
I think the spec overcomplicates everything honestly. Its not that hard to add a long running auth token and put it in the MCP config as a header to send along and then avoid all the extra special rules.
"Oh no it's a long lived token that's bad"
Put it in a secret manager like 1pw cli and now start an agent...
How does the agent auth with 1pw? How do you give it access to only the credentials it needs, with an approval flow and revocation? Who renews the token? You’ll likely end up reinventing something pretty close to what MCP is building towards.
Authn/authz is one of those things that can be really simple for pointed use cases but gets really complex when you need to support everything.
There might be the "agent card" - one place where the user manages what a specific agent is allowed to do. The user grants it tools, connects the accounts those tools need, narrows or revokes any of that at any time. For an autonomous agent the card is prepared and consented before the run.
Such card is the primitive in so called "connection hub", a centralized component, and is rendered from what is declared there: tools declare their claims, accounts get connected in the browser (google docs tools need a google account connected), on their own or as part of preparing the card. Account credentials live in this hub, with the claims the user approved when connecting.
The agent authenticates with one token issued for this card and never receives the connected accounts credentials. Every operation is checked against the grant and this agent's binding to the account. If something is missing, the agent gets unauthorized with the details on what exactly. If the check passes, the hub, loaded by the server as a lib or reached in its internal network, releases the account credential into the operation's execution context. Account credentials renewal happens on hub.
Revoking grant is also done in card and leads to agent's unauthorized on that op next call.
Sub-agent and any automation are also such agents and also can be managed with such card.
So such hub develops into a useful ecosystem component, standalone, like an IdP for login.
An MCP server then works together with this hub, it only declares its claims in the hub (so the hub knows what to render in the agent card).
While all these auth realm duties such as approvals, the revocation and the credentials storage live "at infrastructure".
The perceived difficulty is not what is at play here. People and employers are not comfortable with the idea of long lived credentials to begin with -- and even less in the 'hands' of an AI agent.
The complexity in these protocols is mostly essential in nature (to the extent that you're not willing to totally reinvent the protocol, like AAuth).
Yes, MCP was already overly complicated, and these new features will make it even more unapproachable.
If I need to integrate with a third party service, I'm now skipping their MCP entirely and just going straight for the CLI or API, which are usually more full-featured. An agent usually doesn't even need a dedicated Skill for this.
> Put it in a secret manager like 1pw cli and now start an agent...
And when the agent does something stupid, your long lived token is compromised. It also makes it hard to segregate access (e.g. all those "Cursor deleted by production DB and all its backups because it had an API key that could do that").
Nope, you should instead use something that give short-lived tokens, ideally ones scoped based on the desired intent / operation. Or even better, skip the "agent gets a token" part at all, and have all agent operations pass through a gateway/agent/proxy/whatever that handles that part. That way even if the agent gets comrpomised or does something dumb, it doesn't have even a short lived token to give away.
That doesn't work well for enterprise-managed MCP, where you actually do want the user to overtly authorize their agent to user their identity for MCP services, rather than the MCP server just setting a user ID in an HTTP header somewhere and everyone hoping for the best.
What people who care about security want -- finely grained permissions that guarantee security boundaries, at the expense of bad UX
What most end users want -- for the machine to do what they want, as often as possible, while bothering them as little as possible
Windows' UAC journey is a microcosm of the space. The real long-term win is defining ground level permissions around common use cases, so that when composed they can alert as rarely as possible.
But that's an all-of-ecosystem change: the OS (providing usable boundaries), applications (updating to use minimal boundaries), and users (understanding what they'll need to approve/deny).
Why, directionally all of them. What they say is obviously true. Having to manually click things in the browser is a bottleneck and will be less and less acceptable for serious users.
And the individual work attached to making that transition will be done by agents.
agree. it seems there are two streams and they could diverge or converge?
1. workloads use existing credentials
support RFC 7523 and OIDC discovery, 'trust the trust (credentials) which has already been established'. basically extend current dominant NHI paradigm.
2. DPoP
mandate a signed proof for each request. so tie credential to a client-held key and specific request detail or context. viable to do at scale with #1, or does it diverge (e.g. because most #1 methods as most are not designed for DPoP?
It is viable. Think of workload identity federation as the mechanism for the client to get an bearer token initially, and DPoP as the mechanism for the client to present the access token to a resource server. Each DPoP proof is entirely self-contained, so resource servers don't need to manage any additional state. The only new state is the (usually ephemeral) private key held by the client:
1. Client generates a private/public keypair and uses it to generate DPoP Proofs -
JWTs containing the entire public key embedded as a JWK within
2. Client presents credentials (WIF, client creds, auth code, etc.) to the Authorization Server along with a DPoP Proof
3. Authorization Server validates DPoP Proof and adds a claim to the access token containing the thumbprint - the SHA-256 hash - of the public JWK.
4. Resource Servers will now see the thumbprint claim and now know the access token needs to be presented with a fresh DPoP proof.
5. Clients generate fresh DPoP proofs and send them along with the access token
There are lots of additional details around nonces, timestamps, per-request binding, etc. but DPoP can be rolled out to any HTTP system that speaks Bearer token already.
No - this is built on top of SPIFFE/WIMSE work to enable cross-domain usage where the target domain speaks OAuth instead. You wouldn't expect, say, Slack's APIs to accept SPIFFE SVIDs from your internal deployment. This provides a path for you to exchange your SVID for a Slack-issued Access Token.
WIF works far better when you don’t want humans in the loop. For example, we’d do our development on cloud instances, those have identity linked to our humans via our IdP. Our IdP governs all access, for example: it lets devs use Datadog. If an agentic workflow needs Datadog access and the MCP requests OAuth that slows the loop down. At the same time, we don’t want Service Accounts everywhere because we need to be able to answer “who” a lot for compliance reasons.
Any service offering MCP that doesn't already have OAuth set up is going to have to build out that support first, so instead they just go for a simple API token.
I wouldn't call it trivial to drop in OAuth either because the authentication is one part, but wiring it up into whatever authorization set up they have is another bit of work.
An AI agent would get the most benefit out of OAuth + ephemeral service accounts (the user is having a bot act on behalf of it) + fine grained scopes.
The dpop thing is oauth. It’s providing a significant enhancement to preventing token replay, or token theft, at the cost of some request size bloat + an additional key verification.
Even now, the mcp server itself doesn't have to implement all of the possible security options. You can use something like agentgateway to act as an auth proxy for your mcp servers.
I've been working on a protocol that promises all of that and more. We're currently targeting a NOSTR/Buzz demo in the coming week as a proof of concept.
To be fair, we didn't have the World Food Programme in 1877 which lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.
That being said, the existing energy crisis and fertilizer crisis can significantly compound the negative impacts of this El Niño even if we are able to anticipate it.
Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Corporations may indeed be taking advantage of this, demanding prices so low that the farmers don't get the benefit of those subsidies. However:
> buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later
Is the point of a futures market. Futures let people trade a thing before they even know how supply and demand will balance, guaranteeing a price for the producer and letting them plan purchases of machinery and maintenance, with the risks (in bad years) and profit margins (in good years) going up the supply chain.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it.
Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread.
The point of the futures market is to transfer risk to someone more capable or more willing to manage it. Any effect on supply and demand is a side-effect of this.
The risk is inherent. Not everyone that produces a commodity wants to manage the risk associated with that commodity, as it is a very different skill set.
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance.
And still we are subject to bad harvests, floods, droughts, pests, and diseases. Any given farmer still has to deal with the consequences of this, even if a nation, or humanity collectively, is better insulated.
Futures contracts are themselves also more developed than what was in those laws.
Because tail-risk events are very unlikely, and the average person does not have enough money to diversify widely enough to smooth out their effects. Big entities can launder high variance into low, and they can afford to do this by taking many more positions than an individual. Second, insurance companies directly cannot hold as much risk as they once did. Just like banks don't hold loan books like they once did, insurance tends to reinsure heavily and much of the risk now bottoms out with cat bonds. Third, this is the entire reason we created insurance. It's like asking "why does blue look blue", or when people ask "why does poop happen to smell bad to us". It's tautological.
If what you're upset about is claim denials those are occasionally illegitimate because insurance, like literally everything else, has the occasional bad actor. There's also a massive industry of attorneys who will work on contingency and provide legal representation to resolve that. Much more commonly, it's someone who didn't read his policy, or did but decided post-hoc what it "should" cover. He "shouldn't" have to bear the cost despite not taking out a more comprehensive policy beforehand. This isn't a "capitalism" problem; single-payer systems, generally agreed to be socialistic in nature, still don't cover some things and generally require coverage specifically to avoid people deciding they "deserve" coverage after they get sick. The other major category is things like business insurance in 2020; most policies wrote out plague after the SARS outbreak in the aughts. This isn't "insurers are evil" so much as bio risk is massively correlated which breaks a lot of things about underwriting.
Lots of "acts of god" are, in fact, covered and pay out all the time. Hail and wind and such. Things like flood aren't, because a relatively small number of people live in floodplains and they tend to not want to bear the entire risk. People who live outside of floodplains, on the other hand, don't buy flood insurance, because they don't need it. So you have a lot of adverse selection that makes it hard to insure.
The profit to be made on futures trading is there to supply the capital needed to fund the benefit to the people selling those futures, i.e the farmers.
Accurately and fairly pricing risk is a whole field in its own right, one whose surface I have only lightly touched upon in my life by learning of actuaries and Black-Scholes. Free lunches don't tend to last long in finance, which means all profit margins everywhere, from share dividends and growth, to tresury bonds, to futures, to mortgages, tend to similar risk-adjusted real return.
That was certainly not the intention nor goal of the folks who first set up a futures market for flour in Chicago at the beginning of the previous century.
Another reason why most countries subsidise their agriculture is because in times of war you don't want your enemy to starve you. That's mostly about high calories foods, not fancy salads though.
It would be just easier to not wage war by the way.
Can't think of many countries besides Canada and US that would not starve in NATO if such a necessity arose, and that's because they produce lots of cereals.
All the other countries in NATO are major food importers.
Italy is not food self-sufficient, it relies heavily on imports of cereals, animal feed, oils, and other.
We add value up the chain (with hams, cheese, etc), but bar fruits and vegetables where we are okay-ish, we cannot feed ourselves. Its been decades that even our own pasta is made out of canadian and us cereals. We simply don't have enough, let alone we don't have good quality cereals.
On top of that, our production is super reliant on imported fertilizers and chemicals. We would borderline starve in case of isolation.
Being a major importers of olive oil is probably not such a big deal. The EU is pretty self-sufficient for food, for example - can change a bit the food and agg mix if needed (and some countries have emergency stores as well).
In the US, we have a massive grainfed meat livestock sector that in an emergency could basically all be slaughtered in favor of feeding the grain to people.
But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable.
Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*.
Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so much farm work.
Long may it continue that people who can say no to bad decisions, remain able to say no. Last thing anyone in the world needs with the Eurasian breadbaskets of Ukraine and Russia destroying each other's grain export capacity is the US shooting itself in both legs with an M134.
There are many ways this can play out, assuming it happens at all.
He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithful and only get stopped when their internal crimes against humanity cross an international border and a foreign army steps in. He may do a Stalin and deny (or be ignorant of due to all the sycophants) the existence of a problem. He may say the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" and bring a repeat of all that entails.
Based on precedent, in such a hypothetical, I suspect he will put a 1000% tariff on all food imports to raise enough money to feed everyone, which obviously won't work but he won't know that, and then complain about how unfair everyone is being.
While this is absolutely the case today, and obviously so, history has shown governments are quite capable of starving their people, they have managed this even by mismanagement while those regions still exported food.
Distribution is hard too. It’s not as simple as “we have food and we are mean”. Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians. Who is going to deliver food aid to, idk, Sudan and ensure only the hungry get it? What guns and soldiers will protect it? Who is going to pay for it?
Other countries have a lot of money and excess food too - EU, China, Brazil. I would look forward to hearing their proposals to solve hunger and to shake the hands of each volunteer and soldier and pilot/ship captain going to help feed people.
"Local warlord seizes food relief intended for starving residents"
"Local government distributes food relief to starving residents"
They're the same picture, it's just a judgement call on whether you see them as legitimate. Whether or not that's the case with Hamas, Israel & the US have ensured that Hamas's paramilitary wing specifically are the most legitimate of the local governing bodies, ranging from overturning Palestinian democracy when they attempted to turn into a political party 20 years ago and operating a occupation puppet government in the West Bank, to ensuring that grievances exist with regular provocations at holy sites, with embargoes, or power cuts, to literally assassinating not-explicitly-Hamas-aligned public figures who become popular in Gaza.
The nice thing about food aid is that no matter who seizes it, it's food aid. Unless they're literally lighting it on fire, its entire political power is derived from it eventually being eaten by somebody, and a warlord plus 500 tons of peanuts does not add up to a 500 ton warlord. Better: In some forms of food aid, it rapidly spoils, so its utility to the local power structure is zero if it's hoarded.
> The nice thing about food aid is that no matter who seizes it, it's food aid. Unless they're literally lighting it on fire, its entire political power is derived from it eventually being eaten by somebody, and a warlord plus 500 tons of peanuts does not add up to a 500 ton warlord.
No? Not at all? They can just sell the aid which means they can sell it to anyone including folks who weren’t the intended recipients, they can hoard it and not give it away, they can let it go bad rather than give it away, they can use it to recruit soldiers to repress other people so they don’t starve, they can use it to buy slaves, there are plenty of ways in which the food aid doesn’t make it to the people who need it.
There’s no moral justification or anything to say here to help you sleep at night. When a terrorist group, local warlords, whomever steal the aid it’s just bad. Trickle down economics doesn’t work.
You are describing problems with government cheese, with directing food to means-tested registered impoverished people who live alongside the wealthy & fat.
"Folks who weren't the intended recipients" - the residents of the region were the intended recipients. Literally the first people who make it to the truck and (hopefully) form a line, is how it's usually done.
What's the economic or political benefit to spoilage?
The local power structure is already a local power structure. If your intention is that you MUST disrupt the local power structure and you're willing to exacerbate the famine to ensure that, then sure, don't distribute food aid.
> You are describing problems with government cheese, with directing food to means-tested registered impoverished people who live alongside the wealthy & fat.
No I'm not. Your characterization is wrong too. Poor people tend to be more overweight than the wealthy and also receive more food aid.
> I am describing a region under broad famine.
Sure whatever, but describe how the rest of the world (not the US) should solve the broad famine you've highlighted.
> What's the economic or political benefit to spoilage?
If you're a local warlord it would be control or to ensure certain groups or enclaves are dead or weakened. Withholding food or other resources is a strategy as hold as civilization.
> If your intention is that you MUST disrupt the local power structure and you're willing to exacerbate the famine to ensure that, then sure, don't distribute food aid.
If giving food aid just entrenches the local power structure then it just turns into a new tax of sorts that has to be paid basically forever. I stand in strong support of the countries (not the US) who would like to do this. Go for it.
> Look at how Hamas for example was seizing food supplies meant for starving Palestinians.
Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.
I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:
There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.
Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.
I'm just pointing out the logistics of delivering aid is difficult with one example terrorist group doing so and that was the first one to come to mind. There may not have been evidence of systematic aid theft but that's not the same thing as aid theft. Nevermind that not finding evidence isn't the same thing as something not happening.
But anyway, they do interfere with aid [1]. Them doing it a single time ever proves my claim. But again I'm not trying to litigate the whole Israel vs Hamas war, just pointing out how it is logistically difficult. The rest of the world needs to step up across the board, specifically China and the EU as they are the other main global economic entities, countries, whatever you want to call them.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-official-says-hamas-obstructing-aid-gaza-2026-07-13/
And it goes back decades:
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-209885/
Ok sure but I don’t have a requirement to use the country that has “done more, larger terrorist acts for far longer”, I picked the first terrorist organization (Hamas) that came to mind.
If you want to make your own post and talk about how Israel is seizing aid as a point about how difficult it is to distribute aid and how the EU, China, and other major economies need to step up, deploy ships, send combat forces in to ensure aid delivery, &c., you’re more than welcome to.
Distribution is only hard if you have to find a way to profit off of it. Hundreds food programs of all sizes can do it, from the UN food program, to states of all sizes with food assistance programs (i.e. almost every country), to a tiny charity. Heck even a ragtag bunch of Anarchists can distribute food with their Food Not Bombs charters.
The only thing preventing food being distributed to everybody that needs it is economics, specifically the type of economics which rewards exploitation, hording, and maldistribution. The people with power actually prefer it that way, some people being hungry is fine actually, as long as the rich and powerful in their own country gets to make more money.
Now I am not gonna dignify your genocide apologia with an answer. But you should feel ashamed to have written such hateful words right here on a tech forum.
This is a problem generally with food aid, but in Gaza specifically there is abundant charity involved. All of the problems stem from the Israeli government telling trucks and ships holding that food aid that they will be shot at if they cross the border without permission, and then not giving them permission.
That's not at all what the data shows. Lots of aid was crossing the border, but during some periods over 90% of it was being intercepted, according to the UN's own data (https://app.un2720.org/tracking).
Say this figure is true. That is because so little food was allowed in. If food was abundant criminal gangs would not profit out of intercepting and hording it.
However this 90% estimate is cherry picked. It is one report at one time, during a time when Israel was intentionally starving Palestinians during a genocide.
I don‘t think you know what you are talking about. Or worse, you are so invested in creating an apologia for genocide that you come up with these excuses which have been shown to be false.
Hm, if my options are "not knowing what I'm talking about" or being an apologist for genocide, I'll go with being an apologist for genocide every time. Why? Because if someone is going to misconstrue my comments to that extent I'd rather just be whatever evil you think I am because that's more fun.
Let’s not pretend there isn’t a concerted effort to push a narrative about genocide regardless of facts and regardless of Israel’s actions.
Accusations of genocide were made before Israel’s response to Oct 7 even began, with many claiming the genocide has been going on for 80 years — the only genocide in history where the population being genocided grew exponentially during their genocide.
Even Gaza has had population growth over the past 3 years, despite the war (reported births > reported killed).
Creating a throwaway account to espouse an extremely hateful and genocidal rhetoric is honestly a very weird behavior to do on a tech forum. And then you had AI write this short comment for you is even weirder.
I probably should engage with these claims as they are written, but I don’t think anything here is in good faith. I am clearly engaging with somebody who is full of hate, so much so they deny (or even support) a genocide.
What an original ad hominem — anyone who disagrees with your views must be using AI.
Also, you are arguing with bad faith assumptions regarding my views on actual genocide.
As a descendant of survivors of a real one, I’m not about to give you and your ilk my identity. You seem to think that this is something to gloat about. Good on you for feeling that your side has nothing to be afraid of — not everyone is that fortunate.
This debate was pretty clearly settled after Live-aid.
Food aid organizations were highly critical of Live-aid’s logistics, claimed it would not work because the food just gets looted by the armed factions who will use it to buy more weapons. Live-aid distribute the food anyway, and yes, a lot of it went to the armed factions, but overall food became less scarce and fewer people were hungry.
I think food is one of these things we should just not fuck around with. Wherever people need food, it should be delivered, unconditionally. The food exists, and the distribution networks exist, the only thing preventing people from getting it is most of the time money. Getting food to e.g. Darfur is very expensive (due to bribes etc.), and very few charities can afford it, governments however can afford it, but simply choice not to.
But even outside of armed conflict, where things do get messy, we are still failing people miserably. Many earthquake survivors in Indonesia are now hungry, and food is not being delivered to them. And there is absolutely no excuse why the international society is failing them (except via capitalism).
> But even outside of armed conflict, where things do get messy, we are still failing people miserably. Many earthquake survivors in Indonesia are now hungry, and food is not being delivered to them. And there is absolutely no excuse why the international society is failing them (except via capitalism).
Incorrect. Capitalism isn't failing them. Capitalism is what enabled surplus food to be produced in the first place. Instead, it is governments and other international organizations that are failing to agree upon and fund the mechanism to deliver food.
> Many farmers are subsidised specifically so that food is over-produced in most years, specifically to ensure than in bad years people don't go hungry.
Which country does that? Here farmers were (very heavily) subsidised because footage of farmers walking off the land was political suicide for whichever party was in power at the time. When the subsidies were stopped by a government with a safe enough majority to be able to do it, many farmers did walk off the land. I've never heard of a government making sure there's over-production for future lean years.
If you think that is going to happen, you can buy up some supplies and store them yourself. I have relatives with some impressive and substantial pantries because they're prepared to be snowed in for an extended period of time. Running out of food is possible the least novel problem humanity has ever encountered.
And what would you rather happen? If they don't store up a surplus then everyone will run out of food and prices will go up anyway. If there is less food because of a drought, prices are going up. If corporations start building up a stockpile then prices aren't going to go up as much as if there were no reserves.
TLDR; Yes. Good. It is a great day when there is food available at the local supermarket.
If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food.
There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someone out and say "this person will give me food next month, they've got a stockpile for this drought".
Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
> The world is bigger than your relatives.
I offer no commentary on the size of my relatives vs. the rest of the world :)
There is another option than individuals vs corporations though: The government could and should provide for it's citizens. That is what a welfare state is all about: useing the taxes it collects from its citizens for the common good.
I know, to the US centric crowd at HN that probably sounds insane, but as a Scandinavian this is what I would have expected in the past (though probably not these days).
Any property that is needed for the benefit of all (and where there is no alternative way to buy it normally etc) can be taken and redistributed.
So like a storehouse full of food, with a starving population and broken infrastructure - can be just taken and later compensated not with wartime prices, but "normal" ones. And I believe there are at least in theory some plans for that, which military trucks go to which warehouse and what are distribution centers etc.
I mean sure but if we're just going to give people the money to buy food what is the complaint about big corporations charging more?
It isn't like anyone would be unable to afford food, because a welfare state would imply a standing agreement to buy everyone food at the taxpayer's expense if required. And it is entirely reasonable for prices to go up when there is a shortage, the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight. Someone has to be stockpiling food.
During the cold war, Sweden had vast stockpiles of long shelf life food (and other essential items) in case the war stopped being cold. This would have been rationed out in case of an emergency or war. As far as I know, this is no longer the case since the mid 1990s.
But what I'm suggesting is that a governments should perhaps build up such stockpiles again as we move into more uncertain and less peaceful times. This can help even in case of smaller regional disasters, not every emergency is a full blown war.
> the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight
Why? And it's not foresight that sets those people apart, it's having the resources to hoard the food and the ethical framework that allows them to profiteer off their fellow humans misfortune. Why should we reward that?
> Someone has to be stockpiling food.
Sure, like a government or a coop or a commune or whatever. Some institution who's interests are aligned with the community, not somebody who happens to have capital and wants to make a buck.
It cost them more than normal food to maintain the stockpile. I’m not for profiteering but maintaining a stockpile implies excess production that spoils rather than being sold.
It does seem fair to pay enough to cover that at least.
>the people who built up stockpiles in advance need to be compensated for their foresight.
Or we do what we've always done to war profiteers and hang them after taking their supplies, because hoarding food and expecting to be paid for it while people are dying is immoral and tends to get people a little bit pissed.
There's no fucking bet to be made that people will need to eat tomorrow, or have a house, or have water. Those are basic needs.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
Governments are also actors in this, and have incentivises on a different scale than "how much money this year?"; this remains true even when those governments are literally dictatorships, though as history has shown neither businesses nor governments (democratic nor dictatorship) are correct at all times, so it's nice we've also got super-national aid programs.
The problem with a company stockpiling food (or other basic need like water) in times of scarcity is that it has no obligation to distribute it evenly. This is fine for luxury items, but when it's basic needs, it gets really ugly quickly.
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
They (a corporation) are motivated, by profit. Meaning some people will remain fed because they can afford it. The rest will not be fed. I simply don't think that's ethical.
> If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan?
Stockpile food communally NOT through a big corporation making a tidy profit?
An African subsistence farmer makes what? A dollar a day. The average American makes $60k+ annually.
So who is going to be able to afford that bag of flour?
Further the African subsistence farmer has lost their harvest, so they don't even have that dollar.
The rich will always be able to outspend the poor. Making things uniformly more expensive doesnt change that. The west will continue to have an obesity epidemic while the poorest starve.
"Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
It's either for and by the community or it's for and by a big corporation profiteering off the misfortune of the community. It can't be both at the same time.
The big corporations aren't "going to keep people fed", they will hoard and ration by wealth, not by need. The billionaire will get their twenty course fine dining experience, the beggar will starve. That's not keeping the people fed by any serious definition of the term.
Thanks to being globally remote, easily isolated and events like WWII and COVID we're picky about having reserves (seed, fuel, grain) in storage to ride out <reasonable levels of shit happens>.
> "Communally" and "through a big corporation making a tidy profit" are at odds.
Not really. Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before. That’s precisely what makes socialism possible.
>Corporations are social by essence, and on a much bigger scale than anything that came before.
Corporations are transactional by essence, not social. Any relationship within or with a corporation has the singular goal of making the corporation money. Food deserts exist because corporations aren't social. Supermarkets and stores aren't there feed the community, they sell food only to those who can afford it, and only for a profit. If it comes down to it they'll station cops outside the store with shotguns to keep the poors away and let the food rot on the shelves because that's how capitalism works. That's the exact opposite of everything socialism is supposed to stand for.
It was cut for Yemen, the Congo, Niger, Chad, Mali, Nigeria, and Madagascar. Ultimately, USAID is massive vehicle for subsidizing US agriculture so a lot of cuts related to that got restored. It's also a massive benefit to the competitiveness of US agriculture because a huge influx of "free" (sorta) foreign food is a great way to bankrupt domestic markets. See Haiti for example: https://publicintegrity.org/accountability/haitian-farmers-u...
Yes, AFAIU it is far and away the biggest in recorded history. That said, the 1877 one also lined up with one or two other meteorological events by chance that made the famine worse, and it’s my understanding that we don’t know if those will be present this winter or not.
A modern 1877 scale event would probably immediately fuel (pun intended) a furious climate change debate, even though attributing the existence of the El Niño itself to fossil fuels would not be scientifically justified... or maybe was the 1877 El Niño caused by fossil fuels (so many Wars happened in those years) ?
> Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
We saw already around 2020 or so that specialists opinions didn't really matter. Feelings and politicians opinions were more relevant... so "nobody in planet modelling" means nothing if Politicians and Activists tries to create this link..
Al Gore, if I remember correctly, and António Guterres, i think last month, tried to create this link already.. probably others too?
I can't speak to what former US vice presidents and UN politicians may or may not have said, I've not seen Gore's movie, I don't watch UN speeches.
I have spent a few decades in exploration geophysics at world scale; gravity, tides, radiometrics, upward & downward continuations of magnetic fields, etc is more my speed.
I suspect you may have some confusion, trapped heat from the sun's visible light drives ENSO (a kind of delayed oscillator with noise) and so human added insulation trapping more heat drives ENSO harder (like pushing a kid on a swing harder) but human activity didn't create ENSO - the atmospheric climate cells and swing sets were already there long before humans first planted crops.
Facts? 42 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere by humans every year changing the atmosphere composition from ~300 ppm 100 years ago to ~420 ppm today. CO2 Is chemically stable in the atmosphere and can persist for centuries. CO2 catches thermal radiation from the earth and traps it.
These are all scientific facts that are indisputable. We can also show that its a fact heat affects weather and its not a very far stretch to trapping more heat every year with more CO2 affects global weather. Trapping more heat across the globe AKA global warming are indisputable facts. We can measure CO2 levels every year and global temperature trends.
Doesnt matter who says it, there's a ton of peer reviewed science for every statement there. What's to dispute?
in one hand i wanted to highlight that if it was today, we - as civilization - would definitely create a link between the events, based on our "feeling"
in another hand, i question if we really could rule out, since back in the days, everything that we have was coal.
If you care to get analytic, it's related to the insulation factor of the atmosphere, fairly consistent amounts of sunlight in (subject to know solar variation and orbit) that heats land and sea surface radiating thermal energy out to space with a "small" amount trapped to maintain a globally mean amount of energy that powers climate cells and cascades into other forms.
The global amount of coal use in the 1880s was non zero, sure, but overall the CO2 emissions from those tonnages were minuscule compared to modern emissions within the past 50 years .. and we have direct libraries of atmosphere created since the early years of the Cold War and many pocket captures for the past 200 years, with proxies (such as ice core bubbles) going back far longer.
ENSO predates heavy coal use - so it's not something created by human activity, and as noted the first uses of coal were barely enough to move the needle (recall that collieries kept records so we have a fair handle on tonnages extracted).
Ah, “go and educate yourself” argument never ceases to amaze me.
You seem to know. Why don’t you prepare educational data and educate people instead of “go figure it out”. If each and everyone has to “go and figure it out”, I’m not surprised almost nobody cares. People are just tired of hearing it. They don’t even know what the correct question is!
I have been very critical of the Federal gov (less so under Carney) and I will admit this job report actually was very good as it wasn't just majority public sector hirings which was very common under Trudeau:
Private-sector jobs: +58,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Government/public-sector jobs:-27,000 jobs (a decline) [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Self-employed: +44,000 jobs [wealthprof...ssional.ca], [retail-insider.com]
Part-time jobs: +36,600 jobs [money.usnews.com], [ca.finance.yahoo.com]
I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access.
I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents.
My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways.
> my daughter was caught playing web games in class
Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked).
In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games.
Of course, that whack-a-mole is an intrinsic part youth and adolescence too. I think back to my mostly analogue school days. We found ways to disobey and amuse ourselves in the classroom.
Imagine pusing for locked down paper so kids can't pass notes nor make spit-wads and airplanes. Or locked down pens to prevent tic-tac-toe, doodling, lewd drawings, or scrawling graffiti on those old desks.
Some kind of KYC rules so that the older kids at school cannot pass their broader understanding of the world and cussing vocabulary down to the impressionable younger kids. Age restrictions on the trail to the woods, where kids somehow always knew about that stash of dirty magazines...
I liken this process to a losing game played by authoritarians all over, normalizing a game of "subvert the man" I see the battle fought over sex, drugs, piracy, probably many other topics. Take drugs (for example) "drugs are bad m'kay" but then there are mind expanding opportunities tucked in there as well, yes most have some risk or delayed consequences associated but the lack of nuance (hard to impart on young minds granted) leads to the drugs are bad talk from someone authoritive, and those that dabble bring amazing tales that refute the earlier information that drugs are bad, and survivorship bias and a "new way the authorities were wrong" takes over and undermines the good intentions of those that see the negative impact drugs can bring. Chances are kids seeking a less locked down experience may dabble in much darker places on the net and it may be that this new "KYC" push actually widens that devide instead of protecting the children (which is merely the story used to push for this enhanced customer identity goldmine.)
This is definitely Google's fault. Google allows kids to make webpages at sites.google.com where they embed web games. And because teachers also host content on the same domain, IT will never block the entire domain. They might block a specific URL, but then the kids just spin up a new google site. It's only whack-a-mole because Google allows it.
This could be stopped instantly if student accounts had no write access to new pages at sites.google.com. It isn't worth the distractions nationwide. If it's an absolute must for a class somewhere, then provide teachers with an easy tool to whitelist their class for it.
Would some kids still find ways around that? Of course! And more power to the kids who figure it out. But right now it's too easy for kids to flood game content to their Chromebook peers.
They need to be using deep packet inspection to get reliable and useful blocks.
If you cannot install their self-signed cert on your device (i.e non-managed device) then you likely aren't being MitM and thus, restrictions are hard.
Parental controls on devices are not hard because they are intrinsically hard. The companies just do not care about them, because nobody has forced them to be implemented sensibly. There is absolutely zero reason an Android device could not have a shiny button saying "Kid's device" when you set it up and never need configuring again. So this is not a criticism of the approach, and only a criticism of the companies.
Cross-platform support is very poor (iOS/Android/Windows/Mac)if ur trying to use family link. After trying to make FL work for weeks, i moved to another service that has morel granular features than FL and detailed activity reports with web filtering rules but its paid but it atleast works instead of those unusable knobs on FL.
I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers.
Probably parental control do not bring any profit (they actually add responsibilities, like restriction on ads, collection of data) so the large companies sabotage them by making them too complicated or broken?
Sounds like a technical issue that is not better solved by remote devices doing age verification, but instead by fixing the already existing implementation.
Because Bill Clinton pushed Democrats rightwards with his electoral policy of "triangulation". That was the start of establishment Dems embracing Reaganomics.
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending. Most programs are important to somebody for good reasons. From this perspective, DOGE was always an obvious con.
It sounds like you're arguing for the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job, which implies that there actually is waste is government spending.
>>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
And your response to the claim "there isn't really much waste in federal spending" is to say "what about 30 years ago, someone you probably liked got rid of a lot of things they said were wasteful"?
in short, if 30 years ago someone got rid of a lot of waste in federal spending it might very well follow that there is not a lot of waste in federal spending.
I wouldn't know in one way or the other, I'm just following the age-old HN tradition of pointing out that the conclusion from observation does not necessarily follow. That is to say the person who said
>There isn't really much waste in federal spending.
does not have to be actually making the more narrow claim that Musk did a bad job.
Yeah, I don't agree with OP really. Cuts can be warranted, necessary and popular. It takes actual work to determine the best places to make cuts though. The DOGE cuts were completely vibes based and did basically nothing, especially since the big beautiful bill increased spending right after. Frankly, the main reason I hate the Trump admin is because they make policy 100% based on vibes, always choosing the most intellectually lazy way possible to implement their goals to 'fix' whatever problems they 'think' exist.
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