gustavus

A lot of the answe are reddit-esque throwaway answers and political shill bots, but for a more nuanced answer. For a long timeant people were brought up on the "End of History" idea. That after the Cold war mankind would all get together and sign kimbaya, that war as we knew it was over, sure there would be atrocities and "policing actions" that would be needed to stop some bad guys but everything was good wars of the past were over and it was all good.

This started to unravel as things got more tense with the increasing militarization of China and centealzatuon of power in Xi as well as well as Putins more aggressive moves.

The Ukraine war kicked the whole structure over and dillusioned a lot of people. The problem is that if suddenly history isn't over and war is a possibility again you need to start preparing for it. If you choose not to play the great game you don't avoid it, you just get crushed, and so as a matter of national survival and security you need to start preparing to meet near peer adversaries, but they see you preparing and they up their defensive preperations and military spending because you did and if they don't they might be crushed, and you see this and have to up your spending, and suddenly a massive amount of wealth is going to preparing for conflict.

The whole situation is almost identical to how things were on the eve of the 20th century, with radical advances in technology overturning decades of military theory and strategy, everyone is tense with alliances constantly shifting and real politick dominating everything because the alternative is the fate of the Belgians who had their country shorn from them and their people massacred by Imperial German forces. At the same time we see growing social unrest within nations (stoked by foreign actors trying to disrupt social cohesion of their potential enemies) and everyone posturing with more and more bluster because to be precieved as weak is to invite death as no one wants to make friends with a weak link.

The one important lesson to be taken however is that WW1 didn't have to happen the Great War could've been prevented, a major part of the conflict was the certainty that there was going to be a war. If we can choose to instead try and be peacemakers and bring the overall temprature of discourse down we can avoid another human catastrophe.

They don't need strong arguments they need emotionally resonent ones, "AI is using all your water" is a more primal, plus doesn't matter they just flood with a thousand different arguments.

And updoots might not but plenty of people now are protesting and pushing against allowing data centers to be built near them so it is working.

I suspect rather foreign actors seed some of the anti data center narrative in order to try and reduce American capability to compete in the space, just like the Soviets did with nuclear in the 60-80s.

So even will all the effort we've put into solar and decreasing coal, being more economical unless there is massive widespread international cooperation to suddenly and rapidly start deindustrializatizing the air we breathe will be doing us in less than 25 years.

Sounds great, at this point doesn't really seem to be anything I can do as an individual except enjoy the ride, because it's now a race to see whether swarms of killer AI robots do us in, the global economy collapses, the ocean currents fail, and if none of those happen the air will end up killing us all anyway.

Sounds like I might as well try and enjoy it while it lasts. Cheers!

Our analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shows a trend in negative unit growth starting in mid-2025, masked by steady price increases. But since February 2026, units have stepped down sharply enough to pull sales lower across the US. Prices are still climbing 2% to 3% year over year,

Seems pretty straightforward. They increased their price to try and make up for losses, which in turn mean less people purchasing, which they responded to by increasing prices. A lovely little circle.

Maybe some economists should investigate how prices effects demand, could be groundbreaking.

We all know that's where they are going with this.

The government has a list of pesky troublemakers to target individually if they prove too annoying? I'm sure the good people of Germany can figure out something to charge someone with.

Won't that just unfairly displace the impact onto the economically disadvanteged as they are the least likely to have the flexibility in their schedule, inadvertently forcing more of the maintenance burden onto those who are int be least place to bear it?

That's stupid.

I mean we can start by gesturing at the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, heck England and France had a 100 years war, that was just one of their wars.

And I don't remember the US starting either WW1 or WW2 in fact if I remember that was the Germans and the French and the Russians and the English again.

I mean then you've got the Muslim conquests which do the match the description you're giving the US.

In fact theres only been a brief period of time from near the end of the Cold War till recently where every state wasn't preparing to engage in or having recently prosecuted a war, and there's considerable evidence that Europe didn't have to do that because the US was carrying all of NATO on its back.

So what is unique about the US right now apart from the fact that Pax Americana facilitated the most peaceful period in human history even considering the few wars that were fought?

Sabaton, a swedish historical power metal band, also wrote a song about these women if you're into that kind of thing.

https://www.sabaton.net/discography/heroes/night-witches/

Because of the large quantities my family with 4 children is able to go to Costco once a month and purchase almost everything our family will need for the entire month this means we only need to go to the store one or two additional times during the month for things like milk and bread.

Saying that everyone eating there is indulging in overconsumption is a ridiculous overgeneralization. Not to mention people that are planning parties, bbqs, get togethers etc. Just because you can't think of any reason for people to need large portion sizes besides overconsumption does not mean others are so limited in their imagination.

We have Social Security though and that doesn't seem to be working much better.

For whatever it's worth I use Mullvad because it lets me pay in Bitcoin is super easy to re-up and is super anonymous.

I don't really give a darn who you voted for or what your founder did. I like the product I'll keep using it.

Out govt system literally doesnt have the political will to do these brutal but effective policy changes

I agree our country needs to really have some sort of revolution for the good of all humanity to force this change and overcome the entrenched interests of these greedy corporations.

Maybe we come up with a plan to drastically solve our energy and industry problems, overcome all obstacles and bring about a wonderful utopia, I bet we could do it inside of 5 years if we just gave enough power to the right people.

We could call it a 5 year plan, and listen we need broad sweeping powers to do it, otherwise malicious actors would try and subvert it. Some people wouldn't like it but that's because they aren't brave enough to do what needs to be done for the good of the workers and the proletariat. Rise up comrade let us implement the glorious 5 year plan that will free us forever from the capitalist shackles.

I hate this analogy because it isn't true. This isn't like a clerk checking your age before you buy booze this is like a clerk taking a photocopy of your ID and a list of everything you bought and then storing those records forever every time you buy alcohol.

You would be correct there are no "banned books" in America.

When people say "banned book" they mean that a certain level of government such as a school board or municipality has "banned" them from being in a public (often school) library.

But the headline "In [state I disagree with] they are banning books that have [ideas I agree with]" makes a lot more headlines and clicks.

Then people run with the phrase "banned books" to make things sound worse than they are.

Counterpoint the principles of building a nuclear device aren't that complicated, we figured it out based on work doing in the early 1900's without computers.

It turns out the hard part of building a nuclear bomb is actually getting the resources and real world stuff to build it, even a nation state actor with tons of oil i.e. Iran, has struggled to build a nuclear weapon. It turns out the problem isn't the know how it's getting highly enriched uranium and running massive centrifuges.

I mean sure knowledge is important, but there is a real world out there that also gets in the way of a lot of the more harebrained schemes.

What I'm much more worried about is massive corporations along with the government deciding what you can and can't do and what knowledge should and should not be shared and only allowing access to highly capable models by large vetted organizations while the common people are stuck with safety scissor versions of these things because "what if someone does something dangerous?"

By which they mean dangerous to the powers that be. Remember having the Bible in the common tongue was dangerous and led to multiple wars and much death, but I don't think anyone would say that it was morally correct for the Catholic Church to gatekeep who could read it.

I recently moved from the inter-mountain West to the east and that is one thing that is fascinating to me is how differently the term park is used between the 2.

Out west a couple of swing sets and a slide with a small patch of grass is considered a park whereas out east a park is multi acre wilderness with trees streams and miles of trails.

It's just funny to me how even though it's the same country it's 2 totally different things meant by the word "park"

Just finished a series on

acoup.blog

Must also mention

https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Anyone else notice that the first/near top comment on every HackerNews post lately is someone saying something along the lines of "I had X problem so I went and started working on Y solution if you want to give it a look?"

I don't want to delve into it any further - but something about it seems incongruous. It's not spam it's submarine marketing.

In my early days of technology tinkering when I was young I was always interested in security, and one day I stumbled upon freenet, and my world changed.

It was amazing and led me to get far more acquainted with the cyberpunk scene. It was this alternative separate internet from what the rest of the world saw with all of the good and bad that brought.

I've been meaning to set it up again and get back into it. I will say for everyone pining for the Internet of yesteryear freenet is it. Go and explore it it is everything the 90's Internet was like, super slow, crazy unhinged nerds all over the place random collections of links, crazy.

Thanks for all you've done Ian

Edit: Btw what is the best way to support the project and get involved?

Not that I disagree but it also incentives attackers to steal and resell data to other nefarious actors.

After all a lot of the data companies have isn't their own, it's their customers. They are the ones who suffer because businesses don't bother securing their crap.

It doesn't matter the anti-children systmes have been put in place to be bypassed. The they can point to how it is being bypassed and say "see we need stricter laws and controls" the end game is complete surveillance and control.

Some people are legitimately concerned about the children. Just like there were students genuinely concerned about wealthy inequality in czarist Russia.

Non-technical teams are now shipping production code and many of our workflows are being automated.

As a security engineer this statements fills me dread.

That was always the plan from day 1.

I don't understand your point. The banks and credit card companies are already responsible. If I have a fraudulent charge I call and tell them it's fraudulent and they say okay and take it off and either getit back from the issuer or eat the difference.

Increased work and fuel means increased costs, increased costs means increased prices, increased prices means less food available for purchase by those on the margins, less food means starvation.

I've always felt this is an absurd statement. Yes customers are paying the wages of the people working at the store, that's literally how basic exchange of goods and services has worked forever.

Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.

Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?

At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.

I'm working on an edutech game. Before I would've had much less of a product because I don't have the budget to hire an artist and it would've been much less interactive but because of this I'm able to build a much more engaging experience so that's one thing. For what it's worth.

Oracle? Oracle?

The Oracle that published an announcement that said "we didn't get hacked" when the hackers had private customer info?

The Oracle that does not allow you to do any security testing on their software unless you use one of their approved vendors?

The Oracle that one of my customers uses where they have to turn off the HR portal for 2 weeks before annual performance evaluations because there is no way to prevent people from seeing things?

The only reason Oracle isn't having nightmarish security problems published every other week is because they threaten to sue anyone that does find an issue.

Oracle is a joke in every conceivable way and I despise them on a personal level.