I have to ask: why the two accounts/alts with almost identical handles? Even if I suspect you’ll assert there’s no reason for me to assume you’re the same person as the GP.
> Even with Germany it turned out that Angela Merkel did grave mistakes and Germans were able to find out about those only after she left office. Being continually in office gives you the ability to hide your trials.
A "required absence" is a thing in a number of sensitive positions, especially financial/regulated industries.
> I think you're missing the mark by putting the blame on morals while ignoring actions such as Reagan dismantling unions and removing accountability from news reporting
Also cutting tax rates and encouraging 'pass-through' S-Corps, the latter of which really helped many people skirt taxes:
In the late 1990s, under Clinton, the US was in a fiscal position such that people were worried about US Treasuries (bonds) not being available anymore because of surpluses. Then there was Bush (wars, tax cuts), the GFC, Trump 1.0 tax cuts, Trump 2.0 tax cuts: and people are wondering how the US can solve its fiscal mess? How about you go back to 1997 (tax rates), the last time this was a non-issue.
While tech bros and Wall Street may get a lot of press of getting lots of money, the recent book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There seems to show (using IRS data, etc) a large portion of the wealth being held in private hands.
Interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots:
> In 2014, the economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick were asked by the Treasury to conduct a study on the tax burden of private business owners. It was tricky to figure out how much these sorts of business owners — auto dealers, contractors, the like — actually owed in taxes: After Reagan's 1986 tax reforms, pass-through businesses and other accounting tricks became widespread enough to obscure this class of wealthy Americans hiding in plain sight. The research they conducted led to their new book The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There, and one of their central findings is that there are about three million private business owners who have an average wealth of around $25 million. They call this group “Main Street Millionaires” and their influence on the economy and politics in the US is considerable. We speak with Zidar and Zwick today about how they measured the actual number of rich people in America by sifting through reams of tax forms, why income inequality started to rise in tandem with the growing number of pass-through businesses, and how it's possible that the collective revenue of the nation's dentists far exceeds that of the NFL.
(Lots of other interviews as well as the book just came out a few months ago, so the authors did a book tour.)
Some take aways from the books:
> According to Zidar and Zwick, Main Street Millionaires hold over 13x more wealth than the Forbes 400. And where do they hold it? In pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps) in various industries. Which industries in particular? Zidar and Zwick note that the top five are:
> 1. Legal services. This is mostly law firm partnerships.*
> 2. Financial investment activities. This includes venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund managers.
> 3. Auto dealers. These are the local, independently owned dealerships that sell new and used cars.
> 4. Professional and technical services and management consulting. This includes independent consulting firms and other specialized professional practices.
> 5. Oil and gas extraction. This includes fracking companies in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and other states.
An interesting observation: a radiologist working at a hospital may make much less if they're an employee of the hospital, versus something like a 'consultant' who use an pass-through S-Corp at the same hospital doing the same work.
> In a normal world, this would be treason by an illegal immigrant to the US.
As other comments have stated, this is not treason. However, a private individual/citizen should not have the ability to dictate national security policy:
> Would you say the same thing about Anthropic defining the terms of use of its technology to the military?
No. With Anthropic (AIUI) the terms of use were agreed to beforehand. With Starlink things were changed suddenly on a whim.
If Starlink doesn't want to be involved with military operations, then put that in the ToS, and Ukraine cannot / will not use it for that.
But Starlink agreed to the use — especially with defence-only operations which were part of the agreement, and what was being done — and suddenly yanking capabilities basically means aiding the murder of civilians.
The true statement is: "This is not considered treason in the current legal framework of the US".
Which is exactly the point the OP is making: it is not normal.
What Russia is waging against the US is war according to their own doctrinal documents[1].
If we're stupid enough to accept this as peace while they make one gain after another, it's not a basis for saying that Elon's meddling isn't treason.
This should be a wake-up call.
The world has changed. War has changed. And Russia was brazen enough to publish the new rules.
I hope at least people here have the clarity of mind to read them and understand the implications, beyond "the Constitution uses a particular wording to define treason".
> The fact so many technical people believe that security and freedom are mutually exclusive, and pay for that lie, is proof the Apple propaganda is working exactly as intended.
My Aunt Millie's iPhone is secure against herself because she can't install random garbage off the Internet and is in a walled garden.
As someone who works in IT: users are often their (and their organization's) own worst enemy. We've tried training and blacklisting (with anti-virus) for decades, and it appears that whitelisting and locking things down is what actually works.
I'd be happy with a 'compromise' where there's a factory reset where you can install your own code but it blows an e-fuse to indicate that device is no longer 'OEM certified secure' state.
Chromebooks had a screw you could remove on the motheboard to fully unlock them to do whatever you want. Something no one would do by accident. This was a reasonable solution from the less-evil Google days.
> I'd be happy with a 'compromise' where there's a factory reset where you can install your own code but it blows an e-fuse to indicate that device is no longer 'OEM certified secure' state.
You just described what Samsung does with their phones. You can unlock them, but even if you later switch back to the normal OS, some features are permanently disabled by that fuse.
That is correct. Samsung OneUI 8 removed the ability to unlock the bootloader to any device that installed it. It removed the toggle and also removed the functionality from the codebase as well.
I got screwed by this by buying a used Samsung Tablet for the purpose of rooting it and made the mistake of letting it update after I factory reset it. Never buying a Samsung product again.
I've seen malware popups that give detailed steps on how to install the app on Android. You can put up all the scary warnings you want but if someone really wants to install some scam app, they will click past everything.
I really wish we could have a simple "don't bother me, I know what I'm doing" switch on these phones but I can certainly understand the reasons why Apple and Google are putting in as many roadblocks as possible to protect users from themselves.
Which is why Google is getting ready to lock down Android.
I wouldn’t mind phones having “Adult” mode that intentionally fails secure net and is completely split off from the standard user space. In adult mode I install what I want.
Maybe we should be specific when we mean “secure”. What you mean is like “secure MDM”, when the adversary is the user.
The parent meant “secure against external adversaries”.
Lumping consumer devices with the need for secure business devices and often offloading that to personal devices is the problem.
I wish they stop finding ways to lock down the device in the name of security and/or release different SKUs for the more secure use cases, provided by the organizations themselves if they deem it necessary.
Calling a phone a simple “consumer device” is a lot of hand waving. It’s my bank account, my access to a number of services, an identity provider, etc. I don’t trust myself to secure an open phone and I do this kind of thing for a living. It’s the asymmetric problem: I need to be right 24/7 forever, a bad actor only needs me to slip up once.
The need for you to do banking, and employees do MFA on a phone and thinking that doing requires a secure and closed phone is again a spillover of offloading costs to users.
We did have hardware tokens for corporate logins and banking needs.
There is no real reason why an open phone cannot be secure for sensitive applications.
I do not even own a cell phone and have not for approaching a decade. I live a modern life as a founder and tech worker.
I have a house full of servers and self host virtually my entire digital life and even my own usage of AI, but when I leave home I typically carry no electronics at all.
We convince ourselves we need phones, but I promise you, they are optional. Being offline a few hours a day is also good for your brain.
> We convince ourselves we need phones, but I promise you, they are optional.
Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise.
For many people ensuring their spouse and/or their children's school be able to reach them for emergencies and sudden matters says otherwise. Or an elderly parent (e.g., location tracking).
> Many people's employer's use of MFA (including my own) says otherwise
yubikey/nitrokey. Much more secure by a mile and works when your phone battery is dead. I switched multiple past employers from apps to these, joining as an SWE.
meshtastic asset tracking tag which will work even in emergencies when cell towers are down.
> children's school be able to reach them for emergencies
call-to-one-way-pager bridge, or voip-to-meshtastic bridge. Cheap to free solutions that will also work when cell towers are down.
Hit me with more perceived blockers if you are actually interested. Give me your gotchas. I have probably heard it all and am passionate about engaging people on this topic.
My wife and I have lived without a cell phone subscription for going on a decade and live a modern life as silicon valley tech workers.
Most have the choice to enjoy mostly the same lifestyle they have today, without Apple or Google or proprietary software or cell phones or even debit cards. There are reliable solutions for everything outside of the US surveillance capitalism bubble for those that actually want them.
Exiting surveillance capitalism is possible without major lifestyle changes.
Plenty of ways to build credit without revealing where you live or what locations you frequent and what you buy at the drug store. You can get a line of credit, take it out as cash, spend it privately, then pay it back. They learn nothing about you except you pay back your loans, which is the signal they need to give you more credit.
Where will give you a line of credit without knowing where you live? I'd be interested in _specific_ examples - I did not find any when attempting to actually build US credit when I moved here.
What’s the irony? You have a tendency to appear in any thread about phones preaching the Gospel of Digital Detox without seeming to consider the level of privilege required to be able to live like that. Could I do it? Sure. Is life too goddamn short from my perspective to do it? Also sure.
Never claimed otherwise. I just want to always make it clear people have a valid third choice in threads where people are talking as though Apple and Google are the only options. It is a prolific false dichotomy and I do not mind being That Guy.
I make an actual case for the things I advocate for and actually live my convictions.
Why everyone would is better off electing Apple or Google or Meta to decide what software we are allowed to install, what content we can share with our friends, when our data should be deleted, and when it should be sold to the highest bidder that wishes to manipulate us at scale?
I am convinced surveillance capitalism is a net negative for society, but if you really think otherwise, please make an actual case for your own view instead of complaining about me making mine.
It's true! The EU forced Apple to make it so you can install apps from third parties and every day iPhones are found haunted by malware! That's why root exploits only exist in Europe!
Well, except that one-click PDF persistent root exploit American researchers found, and there not being any sort of iOS malware wave in the EU.
This is the same Apple that openly claimed in marketing material their computers "can't get a virus". My dude, a virus is code, code written with a specified malicious intent. They can...
Also every iOS usually ends up with a "jailbreak", which is also known as an exploit. But somehow in Apple world that's different.
David Byrne was recently on, of all things, Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast:
> History is littered with ideas that have been tossed aside, only for them to gain relevance at some later date. Think of Moby-Dick: forgotten in Melville's time, but now regarded as the great American novel. Or the work of economist Hyman Minsky, which became influential a decade after his death, when the 2008 financial crisis made “the Minsky Moment” a mainstream term. These are just a couple of the things we talk about with the legendary musician David Byrne on today's podcast. Byrne's new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, looks to categorize numerous “sleeping beauties” — ideas that were lost but then rediscovered. Besides Melville and Minsky, we also talk about the lost Roman recipe for concrete and we get into Byrne's thoughts on how to write a song and his own experience of having his music rediscovered by a new generation.
Funnily enough that seems to be the same idea for petroleum. :)
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