“RF Mapping” or open sourced SIGINT? So many issues here. The IC at least has to abide by the constitution (fourth admenment, hello?). What does HE360 have to abide by? Entire company is full of ex-IC contractors and government employees. So.. they’ve essentially taken government tech and now trying to resell it to them? Surprised there isn’t more outrage. These guys will get hacked and a country with no SIGINT program will suddenly have access to an entire constellation. Nice.
The cost of takeaway/delivery has gotten absurd. I was looking at my deliveroo account the other day (UKs door dash) which has my order history all the way back to 2018. The drop-off in my usage and the increase in price post-Covid is interesting to look at. The nice thing about being in the UK is I can save myself a few bucks and just walk down the street to pick up the food myself. To be honest though, prices are so ridiculous I don’t even bother doing that anymore. It’s significantly cheaper to just do it myself (and I find myself eating healthier).
Highly recommend learning how to cook. There are a lot of easy dishes out there that you can throw in a crock-pot or oven with almost no prep, the trick is all in the spices. Chicken, pasta (with lean ground turkey!), salmon.. all low maintenance. Get yourself a steamer/rice cooker and most of the “cooking” is just waiting for your timers to go off.
Well yes, wages have gone up for low paid industries in the UK after COVID and Brexit due to shortages of workers (my local McDonalds is advertising at £12 an hour now), and fuel and gas is largely being driven up by cutting off Russia. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
>Because when Americans “spy on” other Americans they have to abide by the fourth amendment.
Thank you, I had a good laugh: Snowden, Amazon Ring, Social Media, many many more. I sincerely hope that you do not honestly believe that Americans 'have to' abide by the fourth amendment. It's violated with ever increasing frequency and while enforcement is prevalent in some areas it is absent in others.
Can you similarly name the Chinese programs? Read about them in a free press, or at least dissident blog posts? Do you enjoy being able to discuss these things freely without worry of being arrested?
Glad to see pydantic get mentioned here. It’s a great solution for this exact problem. I was introduced to it by FastAPI and have been using it in all my projects since.
At the end of the day you really can’t escape typing. It just makes life easier. We should stop letting languages try to remove it.
Still can’t believe the price that people are paying for NFTs. I’m all for dropping money on art, but when inflation is at “8.5%” and you see the amount of money these are selling for…
As an expat currently in the UK - my electric tariff is about to go from .18p per kWh to .36p. Gas is doubling as well. Most homes here have awful insulation, so I’ll be looking at 230gbp a month for my little two bedroom apartment. It’s crazy out here.
The reporters are asking tough (but correct) questions. The government is also doing its diligence to protect sources and methods. The thing to remember, though, the point of releasing this information is probably to prevent Russia from using this method. It would be pretty ironic if the US government releases this information.. and then a few days later such a video is released. Time will tell.
Your Devs in Ukraine may be expecting the US to pull another Iraq situation where there is no American interest that rises to the level of sending in the US military.
The government doesn't really care that the press believe them, at this point.
If Russia proceeds with the plan they will provide all the corroborating evidence that is needed. If it doesn't, they got what they wanted.
Exactly. It's not like this is the state department saying "We have proof, and are therefore going to invade a sovereign nation." (As previously)
It's, we have proof of this thing, so we're announcing it because that's possibly a good in and of itself.
And the concrete actions we're taking are deploying some troops to NATO countries that want to host them and sending weapons to Ukraine. Neither of these seem like unreasonable actions, considering the numerical disparity between local Russian units and NATO ones.
Otoh, if people don't trust the government, why would they trust any evidence they can present? Chances are it would be the sort of evidence that's very hard to fact-check unless you happen to be running an intelligence service of your own.
So in the end they'd still be saying "believe us." And those who don't can call it unverifiable fake evidence.
"Sure, here is a high resolution video allowing everyone to figure out the locations of your spy cameras, and btw we got the hint from Ivan Snitchovsky, a double agent aged 35, he lives here and this is a picture of him. Oops, he's probably dead by now and a valuable source of intelligence is gone!"
> “believe us” with no supporting or corroborating evidence
There's reason to be skeptic but it's also extremely naive to think evidence of that nature can just be handed as proofs without blowing multiple sources
"No supporting evidence" oh I'm sure there's plenty of circumstantial evidence (like the satellite photos). Putin knows how to play the game of plausible deniability together with plausible aggressiveness.
"Oh but Iraq", we should definitely remember about it. It doesn't help that Saddam played himself. No kidding, he's like a person acting like he's shoplifting something but in the end isn't. Except you just don't get told off at the store door, you get invaded and overthrown.
> Georgia with invasions that launched during a prior olympic event
At least in case of Georgia, this is incorrect. The "invasion" was initiated by Georgian advance on Tskhinvali, and as a final result of this "invasion", no territorial changes have occurred, and the Russian troops haven't moved anywhere they haven't been for centuries already (including all the way up to 2008). If the goal was to invade Georgia, how come when it was all done nobody moved even a mile closer to Tbilisi, and even that clown fool Saakashvili was allowed to continue to embarrass himself in the same role?
What, exactly, was the goal, and the result of this "invasion"?
A friend of mine told me that those who did this are actually repeat offenders who kept getting released from jail due to a no-bail policy. Shows you the current state of the criminal justice system in LA.
Can someone explain why this is supposed to be due to a "no-bail" policy? Many other places don't have a bail system and people aren't looting stores or robbing trains.
It’s not just no bail. It’s no consequence. Criminals don’t get charged or sentenced or fined by city prosecutors. If they do, the consequences amount to a weak slap on the wrist at best. One of the big practical reasons is that George Soros and the nonprofits he funds have financially backed many extremist leftist/progressive district attorneys who practice “restorative justice” (https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-ca...), which is a totally simplistic approach where the lack of consequences is thought to lead to less crime and recidivism. The outcomes of such policies are very predictable and it is why LA, SF, Seattle, etc have experienced a massive amount of crime, blight, and deterioration in the last 5-10 years.
The whole situation is very upsetting because previously safe and beautiful cities have been turned into dangerous slums. And during COVID, the fact that large quantities of PPE and test kits and so on have been stolen from these trains and just discarded on the tracks (not valuable / sellable) is incredibly harmful to the public on a whole other level.
So we have a private company who fires 80% of their police force (not security! They have arrest powers!), then there is a shocking, SHOCKING rise in theft, which the LAPD turns into a cry for more funding despite crime being down. Remember that the reason railroads got the right to have their own police force was because it was their RESPONSIBILITY to protect the goods they carried - this is just shifting responsibility from them to the public.
There’s a reason why this crime spree is happening in LA. I don’t think it’s because of UP’s jurisdiction over railroads. It’s because LA effectively attracts crime and criminals, because in practice they don’t face consequences (deterrents) and become increasingly bold as repeat offenders. LA has induced a cesspool that then bleeds into affecting things like the railroads that run through the area. There’s a reason you don’t hear about this sort of thing happening in Texas or wherever else.
You’re also ignoring the fact that the arrested criminals are handed over to the LA criminal justice system, where the city prosecutors (led by Soros-funded progressive restorative justice advocate George Gascon) reduced/dismisses charges and releases repeat offenders back into the public. This is exactly what the Union Pacific has complained about (https://www.up.com/cs/groups/public/@uprr/@newsinfo/document...).
Finally, the claim that crime is down in cities practicing restorative justice is completely disconnected from reality and laughable. Individuals and businesses see and experience crime regularly and simply don’t bother reporting it anymore. Nothing is done about these incidents by city leadership and prosecutors, criminals aren’t brought to justice, and insurance claims are expensive due to deductibles. Crime is therefore, predictably, grossly underreported.
I don't think we need to invent any political conspiracy theories here. My point with following up on the earlier article is that voters have stuck with the status quo. Invoking big names like George Soros gets attention, but the banal truth is that voters tend to stick with what they know.
I grew up in California but left in 2019 because of desertification (increasing wildfires and droughts) and the tone-deaf, utopian absurdity not directed at traditional liberalism, problem-solving, healing social problems, or long-term sustainability.
Recently, on CBSN LA, they made the usual ("If it bleeds, it leads") big deal when a pretty young white chick working in a store alone was violently murdered by some criminal jackass with a lengthy record. Fodder for the middle class and upper classes to demand "law and order" at any cost, while of course the upper classes enjoy preferential protection and treatment.
Even if all cops were suddenly idealistic, professional "Boy Scouts" independent of political concerns, they aren't and can't be everywhere at once. But, in California, honest citizens aren't legally allowed to defend themselves or their families. And, most cops have given-up and many DAs aren't prosecuting crimes. Sounds like a recipe for a swing to totalitarianism if you ask me, not building a social safety net, a mental healthcare system, and universal healthcare (which Medicare is not).
The most important question is: Are you familiar with Skid Row or what Venice looks like? How about SF, San Jose, or Sacramento? In 2018, I saw a homeless dude proudly relieving himself in the middle of Sac's main library front lawn in front of rush hour traffic. Also, it's not limited to California. Austin had a visible homelessness issue until outdoor living/poverty was criminalized, but now it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind with a quick "fix". The two hotels (e.g., literal concentration camps rather than death camps) the city owns for the homeless quickly filled up and the remaining people had to scurry to hide anywhere else less visible. LA also criminalized poverty for a while through an ordinance that was struck-down in federal court.
Overall, in the US, there's a sense that there is a risk of civil war around 2024-2025 due to a number of colliding factors. Matters that are forbidden from being discussed here because respectful debates and dialogue are often impossible, and also a certain kind of ideological/academic fascism and reality warping and isolation that exists in two camps. Don't dare speak heresy against either camp or be instantly "cancelled" if belonging, or attacked if outside, for daring to challenge tribal dogma. Most people are divided-and-conquered, and there's a certain group who feels they're losing their entitled power. Another issue is the widening bifurcation between the real impoverishment of the majority and the recent doubling of the wealth at the top.
