Spooky23

Data is the new oil, AI labs are the new steel mills.

I think we’re closer than you think. I grew up in a similar place - my school had a rifle and trap team. Great place to grow up. I’d often go out for the first they day turkey season and miss school.

Reality is shooting sports licensing churns significantly and has for many years - the people doing it get older every year. Some of the stats look better becuase many states offer more deer tags to fewer hunters.

There is a huge culture problem. Army LARPing and conspiracy move guns. Legal arbitrage makes the retail channel a haven for smuggling. Marketing lands heavily on that and politics. The sportsman (and often conservationist) is a relic notion.

The more… enthusiastic gun people among us think that the national firearms act (which strictly regulates automatic weapons) is an abomination.

It’s unique in that it’s the only right that aligns with business marketing. Peddling fear, mostly to insecure men, has sold hundreds of millions of guns.

The fetishized nature of modern gun culture killed, in addition to people, a lot of shooting sports and hunting.

The CSAM issue is both very real and abused by politicians. When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior.

The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them.

Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim.

I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off

We “lost” a signage device in a facility we were doing an IoT refresh on.

It was an old wyse terminal, and at some point a CF adapter with an SD card was added, and a construction project buried it inside of a block wall. lol. It’s still there.

Not for nothing, but what do you think is happening in the United States?

American workers have lost income on inflation adjusted terms from 2000-2025. The top 5 companies have a market cap that exceeds the top 30 in 2000, and the concentration of those companies is a single industry vs a diverse collection.

Consolidation of power and capital is reality everywhere. China is not a boogeyman. Go there.

Fair. I’d argue that lack of friction is meaningful.

Also, the Feds are creative in their application of the law. Things like HIDTA designated areas led to Flock-predecessors - scaled infrastructure deployed decades ago. One of the “drug corridors” is the I-95 corridor from Miami to Maine.

Closed loop systems that require explicit consent to share outside the organization. Flock is like 50x worse than NSA stuff like PRISM that everyone freaked out about.

The Feds have full access to search everything, are no doubt exempt from any transparency on the platform, and ICE is already using it to abuse and intimidate political enemies.

It’s a nationwide surveillance system posing as a local police tool.

They do have a legitimate purpose and help to solve crimes. The network effect, funded by federal grants to make a surveillance infrastructure nationally is the biggest issue.

You’re confused becuase they set out to confuse you.

The waste isn’t in employees doing their jobs, it’s what they are doing.

IRS enforcement is a great example. Enforcement is the most expensive way to get tax compliance. The IRS spends lots and lots of money collecting small amounts of money from people with no political clout and limited value. But, because the congressional budget says so, they ignore really obvious and common tax avoidance, which encourages the behavior and drives more losses.

DOGE fired more people and made it worse. I’m running an estate waiting for a determination from them to close out tax obligations, a pretty significant amount. I escalated the issue with my US Senator’s office. I was told they have 2 staff capable of working the issue nationally, and to expect a 2-3 year wait after it being escalated. According to my attorney, these issues took 6-8 months previously.

Rather than claim that they passed money around to make money, a nice income statement demonstrates that they made money.

Cooking up fake transactions to make an investor think there is business happening is the definition of fraud.

Old Apple was definitely like that, I worked with them as a customer and all of the tech people i was directly exposed to were “weirdos” (in the best expression of the word) from a background perspective, a lot of musicians by training in particular. They were all smart people passionate about their work.

My anecdotal 1/1 story re Google from a long time ago was they recruited me via a high level referral for a gig, went through an pretty strenuous (and interesting) interview process and got to the final boss for a vibe check go/no go. I was ghosted at that point. A lot of things could have killed that, but the dude name dropped his Ivy League experience no less than 5 times, so I suspected my attendance at Peasant State was a personal issue.

lol no. They were designed initially so that law and medical students wouldn’t be able to skip out on loans as was common early on.

There are the paths out: repayment, death and fleeing the country.

Remember people marry later if at all so you break the cohort developments of growing up and adulting.

I helped lead my local little league. It’s different than it used to be - it’s pretty typical to have tball parents in their 40s. A group of parents from 20s to 50s aren’t going to hang out, they don’t relate. I’m a late genx, most of my friends parents were in their 30s when I was a little leaguer.

The demise of old line churches is similar. We did CYO basketball in the same parish my wife did. It’s the last of what was 8-10 catholic parishes in my city. And unlike in my youth where you had good mix multigenerational parishioners… the parish survives based on the beneficence of 5-10 people in their late 60s and 70s, with few people rising to behind them. Mainline Protestant parishes are similar. The only growth in religious communities are independent Baptists, which are great but integrate into the broader community differently, because each church mostly stands alone and isn’t part of a bigger system.

The deregulation stuff isn’t about nimby. It’s making nimby 10x worse by making it hyper local. That means poor people who are poorly organized get boned. State regulations tended to help with that.

I live in upstate NY, the rebuild of the GOP here is around hyper local issues, mostly apartments and solar. MAGA changed the discourse and allows the rabble rousers to say the quiet part out loud. (Ie bike infrastructure and apartments will bring poor black people to rape and pillage)

I don’t live in a red state so we have a bizarrely low minimum.

That’s wrong. The poor people who don’t pay are Medicare and Medicaid patients, and both pay for medically necessary transportation.

Those calls essentially cover the base business expenses.

EMTs are like veterinarians. Lovely people who get ruthlessly exploited. Benefits are garbage unless you’re a unionized public employee.

Ambulance crews are almost never 2 paramedics. Most often they transport and do BLS only. If they are it’s because a local government is paying for that service. EMTs make minimum wage.

The people who own ambulances typically have a little cartel like business in a region and print money. They refuse to sign insurance contracts so they are almost always out of network and will not accept direct insurance payments.

When my wife had cancer, she ended up at a hospital that didn’t have the services she needed becuase the ER was full at the trauma center hospital. I was able to arrange a transfer, and paid $1800 for a drive that was approximately 12 city blocks. We had to do that to avoid a complication with hospital admission and coverage. The crew was cool and we did get to honk the siren.

Air ambulance is worse.

The thing with the Economist is that they have a style that’s like an erudite version of the old Time magazine — that is stories written to say what the editors want. Except the economist is way more dogmatic.

I used to read it regularly. I can’t imagine anyone looking to them for predictions, as even a casual reader could probably outline the magazine’s views on most any topic. Let me skim 4-5 recent issues, and I could probably replicate anything they would predict with like 85% accuracy!

I will say that my favorite part of the magazine was the wacky ads for big shots working for African countries, various UN things, NGOs, etc.

I’m imagine that’s coming soon. Most new large cars are getting turbos now to meet federal and state standards, the turbos wear faster and I’m sure there will be a desire to validate them.

I bought a fancy Toyota SUV after my trusty 2008 Honda was damaged in an accident.

The nagging is ridiculous. I’m actually not quite sure what lane assist does, but if I look at my side mirror it chastises me for not being attentive. It also has locked up the brakes and made me think I hit somebody when backing into my driveway.

I wish I had fixed the Honda!

The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.

Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.

About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.

It’s the logical next step for the crypto bros. At this point it’s just political patronage for the small time MAGA grifters who are outside of the big boy financial frauds.

Something bad will happen, and the idiots will just follow whatever the next thing is.

In Ukraine, that was last year. The persistent drone surveillance and strike capability and fire radars have made them very vulnerable to counter battery/drone fires.

The failure of legacy air power to sustain in a hostile environment led to the WW1 style artillery duels. From what I gather in the public domain, drones have created kilometers deep kill zones where nothing can survive. That’s capability that I think is exclusive to the US sans drone.

Artillery and air power killed fortresses. De-industrialization and technology pretty much killed artillery And sustained air power engagements seem to be difficult for the same reasons.

Drones democratize airpower but have significant limits.

Exactly. Won’t someone think of the children?

With a metastudy based on EMR data, I’d only use this to advocate for studying the issue further.

Information like this get collected at a point in time and never goes away. People have EMR fatigue and click though the questions. Anecdotal point, several years ago I accidentally stated that I drank enough to be considered a severe alcoholic. Even after correcting it at my next visit, it never really goes away, I get asked lifestyle questions relating to alcoholism.

Similarly advocacy against drunk driving, a noble cause, juiced up the stats. If you run over and injure a guy on the sidewalk carrying a sealed bottle of liquor, it will be labeled “alcohol related” more often than not based on officer discretion. If it’s fatal, the autopsy will take that conclusion if any party has a 0.01 BAC.

It doesn’t matter to these people. The guy is an official martyr now. Phoney patriots supposedly representing phony religion looking the stage a coup.