pigeonburger
1mo ago
I think the pay might work because it can be presented in multiple ways. Much is made in tech of the 10x engineer. Instead of saying you're going to increase salaries, say you are reducing the salary mass by replacing 10 checked-out, unmotivated, aging, inflexible paper-pushers with 1 young well-paid bureaucrat, 1 part-time tech consultant and an OpenAI enterprise account.
review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities"
Man, this article is the perfect example of how dishonest the media have become. Sure, they can fabulate that he wants to purge the brass to have loyalists for a coup, but the brass fucking lied, kept crucial information from him and undermined him the first time around. He would be stupid NOT to purge them. Biden should have purged them after he got hit by the trap they left for Trump with the Afghanistan widthdrawal.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce.
The pay yes, but this I'm not sure that would be a very popular move. From my understanding of them, Americans hate privilege. Even if money obviously changes everything in practice, they love the idea that they are all technically equals in the eyes of the law, of bureaucracy, etc...
To add to this, I can confirm that this is not just an opinion they're projecting outwards, I've heard high ranking industry professionals despair to a room of colleagues as to what they should do about the "misinformation" problem. They truly believe that the public is turning away from their trustworthy news because they're not as comforting as misinformation.
And those in that industry I've personally interacted with, yes, probably do take their ethics and integrity seriously. The reason they don't get a pass is something I've touched a couple of times here.
Even if one journalist, multiple journalists or even a majority of them, are hardworking and try hard to report the truth, my observation is that as a group they are unwilling to push back against the large contingent of liars and frauds in their profession. And I don't mean "the evil and bad right wing journalists that write misinformation", I mean their own in-group. When outsiders push against them the wagons circle and end up pointing in a predictable direction, leading me to believe there is a tacit endorsement of the bad aspects. Journalists cannot afford in-group loyalty with their peers. As Scott wrote, yes, genuinely criticizing the in-group is excruciatingly painful, but that is precisely what the public expects journalism school to train journalists to be able to do.
As long as the profession as those serious journalists don't start publically cleaning up their profession, the public has no reason to trust them.
Somehow in my career, I ended up being in a position to be in the room for many private conferences. One of the things that was particularly obvious to me is how human (in the worst sense) the elite "speaker" circuit is.
People imagine those kind of conferences as a meeting of powerful people exchanging important insights, but few of them were more interesting than what you'd hear on a very average TV fluff interview. Maybe one of them was at a level of discussion that would be comparable to what we have going here. In a couple of cases I even realized that I, the IT guy babysitting the tech setup, knew more about the topic than the speaker did, nevermind the attendees. Pretty much always the attendees' questions were shallow. It seemed obvious that the attendees, rich but unknown business leaders, were starstuck and enjoyed being in the same room as someone "famous". It certainly sound glamorous to drop into a conversation an aside about that time you were at a private conference of former prime ministers, VP, etc... I know I enjoy it.
In that context, Harris definitely can do that circuit if she wants. If she was just a failed presidential candidate, maybe the interest would fade fairly quickly. But I guarantee you there are lots of rich people who want to be able to say they were at a private conference of a former US Vice President, even if the presentation is just word salad about unburdening what has been. Having been Vice President, she can probably milk forever if wants.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Canada's National Cyber Threat Assessment classifies India a "state adversary"
This is likely driven by the realization with the assassination last year of a Sikh activist in Canada that India is not just a wholly subservient partner to the US world order but has its own policy goals that it's willing to defect on its "allies" to achieve.
On another note regarding that document, I find it funny how these documents are talking about how others are doing offensive cyber ops but us here? All defensive, of course.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
No, I don't think so. They've survived genuine landslides against them before (as opposed to this "slim but consistent margin against them delivering many states"). It would still be totally fair, even after this election, to say roughly half of american voters want what the Democrats are selling. There's no reason for them to go anywhere, just to do better.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Kamala was a candidate who, so far as anyone could tell, had a 50% chance of becoming president yesterday.
As far as anyone could tell bears a lot of weight here. It's not like the US flipped a coin yesterday. She had a much lower chance, we in the public just couldn't tell if the public polls were honest, artificially trying to keep it close to encourage turnout, or were afraid of predicting anything but 50%-50% because that's the safest prediction possible.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Candace Owens is into the weirder end of YEC.
I believe there's nothing genuine at all in Candace Owens' public persona, no genuine belief to analyze there at all.
She suddenly appeared as a "personality" during Gamergate when she tried to claim some ground on the anti-Gamergate side, found herself run out of it after encroaching on another leftist grifter's turf, realized that there's much more alpha in being a black woman right-winger, so after a week she came back as a pro-Gamergate grifter instead.
Someone genuinely moving from one side to the other is certainly possible, but I'm deeply suspicious one would do it within a week. It took me years. Hence since then I just dismiss her as an obvious grifter.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Might be the efforts of Scott Pressler in PA. The guy exhudes weirdo, cult leader energy and if someone could turn it around for the GOP there, I think it's him.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Ummm... I would guess maybe it's because his last name is more distinctive, he is "the" Trump that people would immediately think of if you said "Trump", while Harris is a fairly common name, and Clinton could refer to either Bill or Hillary.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Considering that this organization is literally publishing their passwords in an Excel document on the open internet, would you think that their physical security is likely to be particularly competent?
No, I don't think it is. But the BIOS password is not holding back anything if the physical security is lacking.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Of course, it shows a lack of attention from the IT team who made the document, which puts into question how much we can trust them with regards to the security layers that actually matter. I'm just pointing out that this one "security layer" does not matter.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Lots of people are going to have physical access to these machines who shouldn't have access to things like system settings.
And they all have access to the BIOS settings, with or without the BIOS password. Unsupervised physical access to a machine makes completely irrelevant a BIOS password.
Or are you also in the habit of arguing that people should leave thier doors unlocked because a determined thief will just pick the lock or break a window to get in anyway?
I'm not saying they SHOULD give out the BIOS password. I'm saying that for these machines to be trustworthy, the BIOS password does basically nothing if untrusted people have access to them unsupervised for significant amounts of time.
I'm saying it makes no difference if the door is locked or not if someone is given a couple of hours unsupervised access to your house; they have more than enough time to get in with or without a locked door.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
in the hullabaloo it would have been easy for someone to stick a USB in
If that was possible, then the issue is not a BIOS password, it's unsecured USB ports and no one keeping an eye on them. Someone could stick in a keylogger or rubber ducky and cause all sorts of issues, without any BIOS password.
I'm not making the case that voting machines are secure; from my understanding they're very much not. Just that the situations in which having the BIOS password enables someone to do something nefarious overlap almost perfectly with the situations in which someone could do similar harm without the BIOS password. Replacing the OS with a tampered version is not a drive-by attack even with the BIOS password any worker can do in a couple of minutes with the machine. They need physical access to the machine for a length of time that is in the same ballpark as the time they would need to bypass a BIOS password.
How would you feel about the scenario, "My biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy."
Pretty much the same as if no one had my BIOS password and dozens of people have unsupervised access to my machine, and one of those people could or could not be my worst enemy. BIOS passwords are a paper thin security feature, they're more to keep nosy kids and clueless employees from creating issues for IT to solve than protect the integrity of the data on the machines.
Lots of people from random officials and polling site volunteers, to the voting public themselves are going to have unsupervised physical access to these machines.
Because that's the very point point, a BIOS password is hardly any protection against someone who knows what they're doing having unsupervised access to the hardware, AND it requires having unsupervised physical access to the machine to exploit a leaked password anyway. At best it saves them a bit of time. The usefulness of a BIOS password is protecting against people who don't know what they're doing accidentally changing BIOS settings, or very unsophisticated malicious actors (kids, disgruntled employees wanting to break something).
Because if my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to one of my machines (if I even cared to put one; I don't), I would not give a fuck. If you told me my biggest enemy managed to get the BIOS password to my machine AND unsupervised physical access to my machine for for a couple of hours, then yeah I'd be worried and wouldn't trust that machine anymore.
But so would I if he just had unsupervised physical access to my machine for a couple of hours.
Hence, the BIOS password is inconsequential.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Ehhh, it's not great that these passwords have been disclosed but honestly, it's not the end of the world in this situation, assuming the voting machines are designed intelligently (not a safe thing to assume, I know): if someone has access to enter the BIOS password, they probably already have the kind of access they need to the machine to compromise it in many ways.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
This cements my thought that the “Vance is weird” campaign is a fully enclosed propaganda ecosystem, as in, it isn’t exaggerating some aspect of Vance (eg “Trump lies”), it is just totally made up. And that’s really spooky, because there’s a section of the public that will believe whatever the DNC wants them to believe. If they can make you believe Vance is weird they can make you believe anything.
I dunno, to me it kind of makes sense that a normal guy would seem weirder as a politician than an average politician would. It's up to what people expect of a politician. Normal people don't methodically control their actions and words to make everything fit into a neatly packaged personal narrative, so it's easier to cherry-pick examples to craft a different narrative.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I think the argument they want to make is that Trump is a charismatic populist that will lead his people down a dark path with his "violent rhetoric".
pigeonburger
1mo ago
The modern world being so complex you need layers upon layers of experts to even understand problems is the story the managerial class tells about why it should rule, but that's only a story. We could be doing other things, with other tradeoffs.
I think what did the most damage to this story in recent times is Elon Musk. I think that's what they hated most about him, before the Twitter purchase.
The managerial class had evaluated the question and decided that while electric cars were a cute idea, they were not a realistic replacement for ICE cars. It also concluded that space exploration was just too expensive and that it should just be about launching drones to increase the prestige of institutional Science, and as a way to transfer more ressources to contractors so embedded in the US government they're practically an arm of it.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
What's sad is that had it been kept out of hot political issues, it could still be useful to validate our answers to these questions once they are no longer politically hot. Now that it's balls deep into political issues, even old mistakes will have to be maintained or memory holed because previous examples of Science being wrong are going to be used as examples of why today's Science could be wrong, and we can't have that!
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Yeah, but in that analogy the firefighting department predicted rain, said it'd look as if one of their helicopters dropped its bucket but it'll be rain. 5 minutes before it was wet outside, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and completely cloudless. All weather stations in the areas in question stopped reporting the weather at the same time, then deleted the records of the raw instrument data as fast as they could after the event, so any and all subsequent attempts to reconstruct the weather are done with already processed and edited data, and there's even a video of firefighting helicopters flying erratically over Atlanta.
Now none of this is actual proof, but I would not blame anyone for believing shenanigans happened.
As much as I prefer to see Republicans in charge in the US, this creates a powerful incentive for the Republicans to find excuses not to fix the border.
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