ricecake @ ricecake @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

people will always mess stuff up. Government is just the group of people you have a say in.

When the public good gets messed up, I'd rather it be by the people I can vote out than by the people who only answer to shareholders.

I just don't understand the persistent belief that a profit motive will magically make something more aligned with the public good.

I think you might be overestimating how complex the system is. This isn't collaborative, and it's barely even dynamic. It's essentially bookkeeping around a list of numbers and a zip file of text documents.

https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

The reporting of the issues is already done by other people, they just rely on a central group to keep the numbers from colliding.

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-3576

Not a whole lot there.

Significantly more worrying is the nvd.

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-31161

There's additional data attached relating to not just the vulnerability, but exploitation and the system configuration that's known to be exploitable.

Up until now it was benign, as well as entirely unavoidable, for so much of the infrastructure of the Internet to be closely tied to the US government.

Even corporations understand the value of having a seat at the table. A significant reason for corporate sponsorship of standards groups and such is so that if it comes up, they have a person there who can argue for their interests.
Not even in an interesting or corrupt way.
"Our engineers think it would be better to do it this way, any objections?" And then everyone talks about it.

Leaving means you only get to use what others put together. If your needs don't fit you just have to cope.

Corporations love getting stuff for free, but if all it takes to solve a technical problem is cash, that's great too. Cash is a better way to solve a technical problem than time and engineers.

One of the benefits of it being such a widely used system is that we don't need to make a special effort to do so. It's already been aggregated and copied around as part of routine optimization by any number of security conscious engineers who aren't trying to make the world a worse place.

I've personally worked on at least three systems at two employers where making an automated copy of the data regularly was just an early optimization and matter of etiquette.

It's a good opportunity to learn how to do it though! You have or can get all the tools you need on your computer.

The things that are cheaper to make in the US were already made in the US.
Because of the high cost of labor here, we tend to specialize in things where the unit cost is so high that the labor cost doesn't matter as much and spending extra for educated and skilled workers becomes a cheaper upgrade. Things like jet engine parts, engines, and machine tools.
Also things where you make a lot of them in an automated fashion, like precision screws and nuts or refined petroleum products. We're probably not making the plastic bags or chairs, but we would be making the giant tub of plastic beads used for the injection moulding, which is then shipped to Malaysia to be moulded, and then back to the US to be a deck chair.

The set of industries that are close enough to the line to make sense to move to the US and can be moved quickly enough for it to matter is vanishingly small.
It's why most of our exports have been intangible for so long.

I believe it's paid as part of clearing customs. Since everything is in some capacity inspected (even if that just means checking the weight, container seals, and serial numbers in the freight container), that means there's some record of what's coming in and from where. At that point the importer pays customs the various fees and taxes before customs let's them take the goods out of the port of entry.

The importer would mark it down as part of the taxes that they paid on their purchase, but it would largely only matter so that they can appropriately indicate what portion of the purchase price was taxes that have already been paid so they don't double pay later.

You get better insurance rates as a large business because you have more collateral and have a larger contract. If it gets the insurance company more net money to give you a lower rate per item insured, they want that extra bit of income. Rather, the person signing the deal wants that extra bit of commission on a large contract.

If what you're insuring costs more than the contract value, they'll 100% hike rates to make up for it.
They're in the business of betting that they'll make a lot of profit while you bet they'll only make a little profit. It doesn't matter how much money you have, they'll always arrange the numbers so that their worst case scenario is minimal profit.

There's no amount of money you can pay someone to lose money on a deal.

Hypothesis: you can go to the Great lakes region and just make random noises and people will be like "hey, what's up?”.

If not having it doesn't lose you anything can I have yours?

You're focusing on loss of money while ignoring loss of value. It doesn't have to be currency to have value, and the value of something falling has an impact on your expectation of realizing that value later.

Your position works better with people treating the expectation of profit as value, and decrying unmet profit goals as a loss.

Don't give him so much credit. Everything he does is credited as an intentional distraction from whatever it is that he just did.

I lack your confidence in the racism of the US military. I think it just changes what terms they use to dehuminize anyone they shoot.
It's not like the US has never invaded anyplace with white people.

I have zero belief that any units will ignore or slow walk any orders. There's just no history of that happening in recent US military existence to expect it to happen now. Vietnam saw a handful of cases where people likely killed their commanders, but it very plainly didn't impact the course of the war.

The UN will never determine that the US is engaged in an illegal war. The security council needs to vote on that, and the US gets to veto. The ICC doesn't apply to the US because we never ratified the agreement. It's just someone elses laws.

Direct action against the military is more likely to have an effect, but linking arms is not going to be effective. Impeding military production is just going to get you beaten and arrested, at best.
Specifically interfering with military operations is particularly illegal and carries penalties way worse than the usual you get for messing with other businesses.
If you're going that far, at least do something effective rather than slowing down a truck for a few hours.
Look to the WW1 protests, and what was effective there and what happened.

But that also assumes the US military is unified to follow orders into an illegal war, and that may not be the case.

Curious about why it would be an illegal war. Unjust, immoral, unprovoked, and unnecessary are not actually what makes a war illegal.

The invasion of Iraq was entirely based on false pretenses and the military was perfectly unified. Compared to that, an open war of conquest is pretty reasonable.

The wording is specifically that you need to be qualified to hold the office of the president, not to run for the office.

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

With qualifications to hold the office being:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

So the phrasing of the 22nd created an issue:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once

Elsewhere it talks about eligibility to hold office, but the 22nd only refers to election.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-22/overview-of-twenty-second-amendment-presidential-term-limits

There's also a similar issue with the speaker of the house, where eligibility isn't as clearly defined as one might expect.

While the intent of the law was clearly to codify the previous pattern of capping it at two terms (and being spiteful to FDR) it's phrased with enough ambiguity that it's clear how they'll argue it.

Possibly not the greatest example. The whole "Japanese internment camps" thing, as well as the (radically less controversial) suspension of habeas corpus for Germans captured on US soil.

More that it normalizes a return to military expansion of national borders.
Russia is trying to grow their territory by annexing neighbors.
China would plainly like to.
The US didn't, which made the scales tilt towards Russia acting badly and unusually badly.

With the shift, Russia is just the only one acting on a policy item that all the major powers have.

And like clockwork: https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-arctic-trump-greenland-2dbd00625c2c0c3bd94a2c96c7015b69

"Putin says US push for Greenland rooted in history, vows to uphold Russian interest in the Arctic"

Speaking at a policy forum in the Artic port of Murmansk, Putin noted that the United States first considered plans to win control over Greenland in the 19th century, and then offered to buy it from Denmark after World War II.

“It can look surprising only at first glance and it would be wrong to believe that this is some sort of extravagant talk by the current U.S. administration,” Putin said. “It’s obvious that the United States will continue to systematically advance its geostrategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic.”

The US and Greenland; Russia and Ukraine: it only matters that it's rooted in history, right?

It's worth noting that one of those organizations is IBM. Mostly relevant because they're the ones that originally built a lot of that cobol, the mainframes it runs on, and even the compilers that compiled it.
They're basically the people you would expect to be able to do it, and they pretty quickly determined that the cost of a rewrite and handling all the downstream bugs and quirks would exceed the ongoing maintenance cost of just training new cobol developers.

My dad was a cobol developer (rather, a pascal developer using a compiler that transpiled to cobol which was then linked with the cobol libraries and recompiled for the mainframe), and before he retired they decided to try to replace everything with c#. Evidently a year later their system still took a week to run the nightly reports and they had rehired his former coworkers at exorbitant contractor rates.

"this is the fault of the democrats and Joe Biden. If they hadn't messed everything up we wouldn't need to fix it like this".

They'll say that and their constituents will listen. Remember, these are people who voted for the guy who wrecked the economy over the guy who made progress improving it because the economy was bad and they wanted it to be better, like what the first guy wrecked.

It does work there. The unfortunate thing is that so many sites change their login structure often enough that it no unusual to discover that a site just changed again and you need to update the list.

Should have said you'd be delighted for them to visit, and then just not let them inside. Deny any knowledge of talking to them before. Waste their time and money and call them names.