quarterdime

Interesting. Two key quotes:

It is unclear if the Intercept ruling will embolden other publications to consider DMCA litigation; few publications have followed in their footsteps so far. As time goes on, there is concern that new suits against OpenAI would be vulnerable to statute of limitations restrictions, particularly if news publishers want to cite the training data sets underlying ChatGPT. But the ruling is one signal that Loevy & Loevy is narrowing in on a specific DMCA claim that can actually stand up in court.

Like The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet are asking for $2,500 in damages for each instance that OpenAI allegedly removed DMCA-protected information in its training data sets. If damages are calculated based on each individual article allegedly used to train ChatGPT, it could quickly balloon to tens of thousands of violations.

Tens of thousands of violations at $2500 each would amount to tens of millions of dollars in damages. I am not familiar with this field, does anyone have a sense of whether the total cost of retraining (without these alleged DMCA violations) might compare to these damages?

Enron energy traders called power plants and asked them to shut down during high load times. They encouraged the plant personnel to fabricate the reason for shut down. This created an electricity shortage, which forced rolling blackouts. Energy prices shot up, making for massive profits for Enron. There were also headline stories about elderly people suffering without air conditioning. The Enron traders joked about this in their phone calls to one another.

Of course, we only know about this because their phone calls were recorded. If I recall correctly, none of the traders indicated that they were aware their calls were recorded.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-feb-04-fi-enron...

https://www.npr.org/2006/01/31/5180594/enron-trader-tapes-av...

If you are using qubes, you are likely using kicksecure. Whonix (used by many qubes users) is based on kicksecure.

I have heard this argument before, and it made sense to me until I became a patient. First of all, if the 3rd party (insurance company) was so incentivized to guard against fraud, why would they repeatedly lose documents that had been submitted to them?

For starters, she said bluntly, “we know everything is going to get denied.” It’s almost a given, she said, that the insurer will lose the first batch of records. “We often have to send records two or three times before they finally admit they actually received them. … They play all of these kinds of delaying games.”

Insurance companies costs come less from the first $10k of patients' spending, and much more from the next $10M. Very few, very expensive patients make up the bulk of the cost. This article (and other great Pro Publica reporting) demonstrates some of the ways that insurance companies cut these costs--ultimately by refusing to pay (or delaying) for necessary care.

The espionage act famously does not allow for whistleblowing as a defense. Tulsi Gabbard [1], Rashida Tlaib [2], Ron Wyden and Ro Khanna [3] (and perhaps others) have tried to introduce legislation to change this. For example, Reality Winner was unable to make any public interest arguments in her defense [4]. Ed Snowden has repeatedly said he would happily return to the US to face trial if he were allowed to make a public interest defense. For example, in a 2019 NPR interview [5]:

My ultimate goal will always be to return to the United States. And I've actually had conversations with the government, last in the Obama administration, about what that would look like, and they said, "You should come and face trial." I said, "Sure. Sign me up. Under one condition: I have to be able to tell the jury why I did what I did, and the jury has to decide: Was this justified or unjustified." This is called a public interest defense and is allowed under pretty much every crime someone can be charged for. Even murder, for example, has defenses. It can be self-defense and so on so forth, it could be manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. But in the case of telling a journalist the truth about how the government was breaking the law, the government says there can be no defense. There can be no justification for why you did it. The only thing the jury gets to consider is did you tell the journalists something you were not allowed to tell them. If yes, it doesn't matter why you did it. You go to jail. And I have said, as soon as you guys say for whistleblowers it is the jury who decides if it was right or wrong to expose the government's own lawbreaking, I'll be in court the next day.

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/crsj-fe... [2] https://theintercept.com/2022/07/12/whistleblower-espionage-... [3] https://www.rcfp.org/espionage-act-reform/ [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reality-winner-espionage-act-60... [5] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/761918152/exiled-nsa-contract...

Great videos. First video, about 22:50: "and we had a new challenge, OK? For the last three or four years our, our distribution has run sold out. So anytime we go and get a sale and we go and create inventory, we know it's going to be bought."

Meanwhile, from the DOJ release: "According to evidence presented at trial, Shah, Agarwal, and Purdy sold advertising inventory the company did not have to Outcome’s clients, then under-delivered on its advertising campaigns. Despite these under-deliveries, the company still invoiced its clients as if it had delivered in full."

Wow.

There has been some reporting about commercial morgage backed securities (CMBS): https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...

I am glad you are still here, yet sorry to hear of that experience. Thanks for sharing.

Couldn’t figure out how to fight them at the time, since most of my reasoning was gone.

Very similar to my experience too. Very few people are best prepared to fight a bureaucracy while dealing with a health issue that racks up millions.

This story sounds all too familiar to me. I have been denied coverage and subsequently saddled with debt. I know others who have experienced similar. I wonder how widespread this is.

Reading about insurance company's internal process is deeply upsetting. It is like a kangaroo court, where the denial of benefits is predetermined. Documentation to support this conclusion is fabricated. Documentation that does not support the conclusion is buried.

Your suggestion of staying home if sick is one I agree with. Unfortunately I cannot make others do this. In fact, where I live in the USA I come across people who are visibly/audibly ill in my daily life: air travel, public transport, grocery store, and so on. I would prefer if these people stayed home, but can I make them? I can wear a mask, and I do (typically N95 in public places). If others think I look crazy, that is a small price to pay to avoid a few weeks of being sick or infecting someone else. Particularly my vulnerable family members.

Thanks for the arcgis link. It is interesting to compare to the Sentinel 1A data from the study[0]. For example there is one existing (ground based) measurement East of Mont Belvieu (P050), but most of the displacement in the satellite data appears just to the West, centered on Mont Belvieu. This is by eye only, so I may be mistaken in comparing the locations.

The ground based measurement for sensor P050 reports up-down displacement of -0.07 cm per year between 2017 and 2020.

It is difficult to determine the exact value from a shaded image, but the satellite data show that just to the West of this ground based measurement (about centered on Mont Belvieu), displacement was -1.91 to -0.85 cm per year between 2016 and 2020 (see figure 3b).

The arcgis site has useful data that could be used better compare trends for the same dates [1]. I did not look at every year, but it looks like 50+ ground based measurements per year. The study's methods are a bit beyond me, but section 3 describes processing a total of 89 Single Look Complex (SLC) images from 2016 to 2020. I could not find any mention of exact dates.

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/14/15/3831# [1] https://hgsubsidence.org/GPS/2021/P050_HRF20_neu_cm.col

In my own working experience and speaking with others, this is the part of "quiet quitting" that is too often missed. This is 100% about the question "does extra professional effort on my part, to the point of sacrifices in my personal life, lead to any benefit or reward?"

In game theory terms, if we have a system that increasingly disincentivizes cooperation and incentivizes defection, it should surprise no one to see less cooperation.

Is your brother still in the industry? If so, what are his thoughts about the current working conditions and the possible strike beginning Friday?

What is the second person supposed to do - get out and push?

Despite the relatively low rolling resistance, even a single rail car is too heavy for a human to push.

I am not a railroad worker so I may have this wrong. But there are a number of reasons that a second (or third) person is a big help from a practical or safety standpoint.

For example, if you are picking up a car (adding it to the train), the engineer will drive the locomotive forward/back while in radio contact with a person on the ground. The person on the ground will confirm the couplings closed properly, and connect air lines for brake system. Doing this with two or three people over the radio is faster, easier, and probably safer. I think one of the safety concerns here is a coupling that has closed incompletely or improperly: if it lets go as the train climbs a grade, you can have a loose car (or a string of cars) on the track. If I understand correctly, you want to watch the coupling "catch" as the train inches forward. Maybe there is a sensor-based solution, but I am not sure.

Another advantage for a second (or third) crew member is safety. If there is a derailment and a solo crew, that person stays with the locomotive and reports the accident. Someone has to drive to the scene (in most cases by road). This adds a lot of time. In the event of a derailment, this time is a big safety concern. A lot of hazmat (chlorine, ammonia, chemicals, hydrocarbons) are shipped by rail.

I am sure there is quality of life as well. Being alone is far more difficult psychologically.

In the end, we can say "US freight should have single person crews" all we want, but good luck finding a labor force willing to do it. The rail industry is struggling to recruit and retain workers. Switching to single person crews would not help if half of the workers quit.

This is a great point. A lot of ideas pushed by managers (like one person train crews) have been of the "sounds good on paper" variety. Adding and adding to the length of trains. Replacing (human) wheel inspectors with automation. Replacing (human) schedulers with software. Cutting the crew size on trains as you point out.

In practice, the increased train length seems to have increased the frequency and magnitude of accidents. And increasing the number of cars in a train is not guaranteed to increase efficiency.

About inspection of wheels, automation might sound like a good idea, but it doesn't seem to be working. Stand next to a moving freight train today, and odds are very good that you will hear a BOOM-BOOM-BOOM from a surprising number of cars as they go by. These are flat spots on wheels. I do not think this is good for the freight, the cars, or the rails. My personal observation is that this is new. Even a decade ago, I do not remember routinely noticing this. But today, it seems a significant percentage of cars roll by with big flat spots on their wheels. This is out of my area of expertise, so I may be way off on this "flat spot" story.

The software for scheduling seems to be chaotic at best. The railroads have responded by pretty much putting all employees on call all the time. This seems to be one of the workers' biggest complaints: they are pretty much 24x7x365 on call, and it is not surprising that they are angry. When I say they're angry: in July the BLET (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainment) voted over 99% in favor of a strike.

Cutting crew size too is kicking peoples' butts. For example to pick up a car alone would require a massive amount of running back and forth from the front to the back of the train. From a safety standpoint: a single person crew has to remain at the engine in the case of an accident or derailment, and someone has to drive to the scene to assess the scene. If there is a two person crew, the second person can walk down the line and report (for example) that there may be a chlorine car leaking[0].

I know a few people second hand on both sides of the who work in industries that ship freight via rail, and people who work on the railroads. Both sides have been describing chaos and mismanagement for years (predating pandemic). Pay on the railroad is fairly good, but the lifestyle is extremely demanding. Policies over the last decade have made it a worse and worse industry to work in. Strike or not, the railroads are getting deeper and deeper into a worker shortage. I think they need a better (for workers) contract just as much as the workers do.

[0] https://inthesetimes.com/episodes/jay - 100% worth a listen

Thank you for this. Especially your first two paragraphs I agree 100% and I think those points are closely related to the Wikipedia article.

Along these lines I could add that in Saskatoon, despite at least three men being murdered by police and many more kidnapped by this practice, only two officers have ever been convicted (for unlawful confinement). There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of things to say about this story.

Which is why I found it surprising that the top comment was about drug use and violence in Inuit communities. As I measure it, this is at least two logical "hops" from the topic of the 'starlight tour' story in Saskatoon. Furthermore these topics are extremely sensitive in this context. Violence and substance use have been (and still are) used to justify the practices that you described above--in particular separating children from parents.

I don't know how to say well what is in my heart now. In what I have written, I am afraid of sounding like a person yelling accusations on the internet. This is not my intention. I am bringing this up in a spirit of honest dialog. I often choose to say nothing rather than risk saying the wrong thing, or even saying something in the wrong way. I think in a perfect world we would discuss these topics without fearing the shame of feeling this. Even as I type this, I feel a thin film of sweat on my hands. I am again afraid of saying something wrong. People on the internet might yell at me. I am equally afraid of giving anyone else the feeling of being yelled at. I wrote and deleted, rewrote, and redeleted this comment and my earlier comment a number of times. But I click "reply" with the hope that we can all somehow make a better world, and that we won't get there unless we try to talk about it. I am trying to learn my history, I am trying to learn how to talk about it. I hope I have written this in line with what is in my heart, which is a desire to better understand and be understood. And for every one of the comments on this topic, I am glad that so many people clicked the same "reply" button to openly share their thoughts.

Your thoughts are interesting, but I am having trouble seeing how this relates to the Wikipedia article. The Wikipedia article is about police murdering a number of Indigenous Canadians. I am not sure what the connection is to a "virus" of drugs and anger spreading among Inuit people.

I believe that none of the men in this Wikipedia article are Inuit. Wikipedia reports 2016 census showing the following Indigenous population of Saskatoon: 85 Inuit, 14,430 First Nations, and 12,255 Métis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon#Demographics

To add to others' comments about timber harvest: Logging operations in burned areas can greatly accelerate erosion. Dead trees have ecological value as habitat and food (woodpeckers are a textbook example). Dead trees have ecological value in the long term as they ultimately become soil (both the volume and contour). Check out Tom Wessels (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLQz-oR6sw)

I have not studied or worked with bio-oils, but on biochar: As a soil amendment, many soil types are incompatible with addition of biochar. Biochar tends to retain water, which is a problem if you add it to already poorly draining soils. Biochar also shifts soil pH. In some cases this is good, in other cases it is bad. I think it is the minority of soils that are actually improved by adding biochar. I am not aware of any studies that show that biochar is a suitable carbon storage scheme. The last time I reviewed the research, the behavior of carbon in soils is as yet poorly understood and appears to be quite complex. It may be a decade or more before we understand what biochar does when added to different soil types, and we might learn that the majority of it ends up as CO2 within a couple years.

Finally you mention burying trees: it may be that this accelerates the release of Carbon. Depending on climate, standing timber often lasts longer. Dead wood on the ground (or buried) is often wetter, which favors decomposition.

I am not trying to sound negative here. You bring up a lot of points that are being actively researched and worked on. But there are not any clear easy solutions. We need to work on this problem. I wish we (as a society) were putting a lot more into this effort.

I agree that a living tree is not much of an offset. Trees are short term (and small) carbon stores when compared to fossil fuels. However I do not think that burying a tree solves the problem. Unless we find a way to prevent fungus from breaking down lignin, I am not sure that burying a tree is a viable long solution for carbon sequestration. It is outside of my area of expertise, but I can find at least one paper that suggests that coal deposits formed before the evolution of fungal species that could break down lignin (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1221748). It is extremely difficult to turn CO2 back into coal. I am in favor of reducing forest loss (and ideally increasing forest area), but I am unconvinced that it will have any meaningful effect on atmospheric carbon in the near, mid, or long term.

From my understanding, the SEC does not share award recipients' identities. That said, every time I see news of an award I wonder if it's gone to an insider or short seller.

The insiders are sort of obvious. But the short sellers... From what I understand, the game goes like this: sniff for signs of fraud in publicly traded companies (I forget who, but one famous short seller jokes that he looks for CEOs with hairpieces). Find evidence of fraud. Often this requires forensic accountants analyzing publicly available financial data. Submit evidence of fraud to the SEC. AND short the stock, go public with the evidence of fraud while disclosing your short position. If you're right, you can hit two paydays: the SEC whistleblower award AND the proceeds from the short sale.

I have zero experience with any of this. I am just recalling (as well as I can) a rabbit-hole I went down over a year ago.

As a former wildland fire fighter, I can assure you that temperature (and wind and relative humidity) have a HUGE effect on fire behavior. Furthermore temperature and relative humidity (not so much wind) have a huge impact on ignition. My training emphasized this quite heavily, but I thought the effect was exaggerated until I experienced it first hand.

In the Western US, construction, mining, forestry, etc. industries are well aware of the fire risk from routine work (construction equipment, off road vehicle traffic, chain saw work, etc.). In "red flag" conditions, there are fire watch policies. For example in forestry work, my crew would have to cease chain saw work late in the morning and stand a fire watch for 30 minutes before leaving the work site.

So as I watch the news about these fires, my first thought is ignitions: routine activities (parking a vehicle on grass, driving construction equipment, discarding a cigarette) that would be unlikely to cause a fire in normal (backward looking) UK weather conditions. My next thought is that once a fire has started, it is likely to burn hot and fast. Hotter and faster than I suspect fire fighters in London are accustomed to.

As an aside, I have been trying to figure out a good source for weather data. I see plenty of sources for temperature, but I am curious about the wind speeds and relative humidity. From the photos I am seeing, it looks like wind speeds are over 10 mph.

This is a fair question but the answer can get complex. Honestly the design/manufacturing of this aircraft joint is way above my expertise and pay grade. I would hope that Boeing has some extremely specialized and talented people working on this. In short, the question of how a gap might affect this assembly is far outside my expertise. However if you want a simple example:

Consider a geometrically perfect cylinder resting on a perfect plane. The contact is a line, with zero width. Therefore a contact area of zero. Pressure is force divided by area. So the nonzero weight of the pin, divided by area (zero) is... infinite? You run into the same problem with a pin in a slightly larger hole. How does this seemingly infinite pressure not lead to failures in wheels (think of train wheels on tracks), ball bearings (spherical balls in torroidal raceways with slight clearance), roller bearings, etc? We are surrounded by geometries that have seemingly zero area points of contact, but they support tremendous loads.

Hertz (yeah, the same guy for whom the 1/s unit is named) figured out the math behind these contact stresses. Basically, for round (and round-ish) things in 2d and 3d, the contact stress has a lot to do with the deformation of the materials. To answer the riddle above (of the cylinder on plane infinite contact stress), you have to consider the deformation of the cylinder and the plane. The stiffness of the materials comes into play, as well as the geometry. You can read up on Herz (or Hertzian) contact stresses if you would like to know more. The math is not terribly difficult, especially for 2d geometries. For a 2d case of a pinned joint, you can often find that a change of a couple thousandths of an inch can mean the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and failure.

I have given a hand-waving example of the importance of tight tolerances on clearances for a small class of problems. I hope it is close enough to the subject matter at hand to be of some use. My comment is from memory, so please forgive (and correct!) any mistakes I've made.

edit: I am rereading my comment, and realize that I didn't make explicit the importance of tight fit for Hertzian contact stress. The smaller the gap between a pin and hole, the greater the contact area (with the same amount of deformation). Think of it this way--for a fixed amount of deformation (say strain at failure), you can carry way more load if the contact area is greater. How do you increase this contact area? By a smaller difference in diameters (smaller gap) of pin and hole. So all things equal (material properties, load), a smaller difference between pin and hole diameters will increase load the joint can carry.

Another point: calculating these contact stresses is doable for most metals, but is far more complex for anisotropic materials (mechanical properties vary in different directions) materials like the carbon fiber composites.

There are numerous reports on debris (metal shavings, tools, and even a whole ladder) being discovered in aircraft by customers after delivery. This requires not only that assembly signed off on the aircraft, but that the issues are not discovered in final inspection either.

Some reporting suggests several major customers (airlines) were so fed up with this 'foreign object debris' (metal shavings etc) problem that they said they would only accept aircraft from Washington. From your story, I can't help but wonder if Boeing management got around this by flying near-complete aircraft from SC to WA to get around this.

To give you a sense of how bad this debris issue is: the US Air Force refused delivery of new air tankers after finding debris (in fuel tanks if I remember correctly).

0.005 inch is indeed quite small, and a demanding tolerance indeed for carbon fiber composite construction. I trust that Boeing design engineers would have know full well that this tight tolerance would cost a lot of money, and would therefore specify it only if necessary. When the out of spec assemblies were discovered, Boeing could either use testing and analysis to show these gaps are OK or rework the aircraft to get them in spec. They chose the latter.

In short, just because 0.005 inch is a small number does not mean the article is grasping at straws. I routinely design mechanical assemblies where the difference between 0.005 inch and 0.010 inch is the difference between a comfortable factor of safety and guaranteed failure under design loads.

From that wikipedia link: "Colonel General Varfolomey Korobushin, former Deputy Chief of Staff of Strategic Rocket Forces, in 1992 said that the Russians had a system, to be activated only during a crisis..."

Activated only during a crisis? In late February Putin announced that "deterrence forces" were placed on high alert. Reporting on the topic was vague, with no answers about what this announcement meant. In a Reuters article after that announcement, an unnamed US official said this was "putting in play forces that, if there's a miscalculation, could make things much, much more dangerous" [0]. I wonder if Putin's announcement meant activating this dead hand system.

Finally I suggest watching Dan Ellsberg's "Doomsday Machine" talk [1].

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/russian-strategic-missile-forc... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7cJG9j0NdY

About the 40 acres, I forgot to link the article where the 40 acre claim is made: https://www.businessinsider.com/startups-working-to-fight-wi...

Although I agree that better detection may have some value, I have not seen anything from this company (their website or the press they link to) that indicates they actually add anything here.

A story: I was on a crew that was chasing after a series of dry lightening strikes (hundreds of strikes in a night). It was a bad scenario because the weather forecast showed hot, dry, windy weather was coming, so we were in a race against the weather to put out the ignitions. The next morning we chased after the fires, map in hand (showing the location of every lightening strike). We started with the ones in the sketchiest conditions (fuels, terrain, buildings). We put out one after another tiny fire for days. Some were single smoldering trees, some had grown to a few acres. We were lucky to get them all out just before the bad weather arrived. Our limiting factor was not the ability to detect the fires, but the ability to put them out. This is sort of typical of my limited experience. Obviously my experience is small in terms of time and geography. I would however be curious about any research that addresses the value of better detection. It may be that small improvements in detection would help a lot, or it may be insignificant. But the reason for my story is that in my (very limited) experience, detection has not been the problem.

Finally I can't talk about fire suppression without mentioning how tenuous the situation is. On the one hand, the story I told above is one where we prevented a massive fire (given the weather and fuels). But really we just kicked the can down the road. At the end of that story, the conditions were a tinderbox forest in a historically dry and dying forest. Much of the West is in record drought, summers keep getting hotter and drier, wildland-urban interface is getting worse, and fuels keep building up because of beetle kill, our "successes" in fire suppression, etc.

It's not like the fire community doesn't know. This was covered in my training. Everyone in the field knows how it's bad and will only get worse. But the political aspect of this paralyzes progress. Prescribed burns for example: they get shut down because people don't like the smoke and they call their senators. Imagine that. Even if that wasn't a problem, burning is incredibly labor intensive and we more than a century behind. Prescribed burns for a meaningful fraction of Western lands would take an absolutely massive effort and funding. It is skilled and labor intensive work. It's also not risk free. Not that burns will save us. I fear that warming/drying climate likely means the end of forests in much of the US West no matter what we do.

You have some good points and questions here. I spent 3 summers as a wildland fire fighter and have seen lightening strikes/small fires up to massive 100k acre affairs. I will speak from that experience, but keep in mind it was over a decade ago and it's been a while since I had to think about any of this.

As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive.

You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area.

You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land?

You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews.

Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.

It seems to me like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in sections of 40 acres each [1]. Yosemite is about 700k acres.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/startups-working-to-fight-wi...

I could have worded that better. The people I know who have worked at amazon have described miserable conditions, but great pay. They stayed (for a while) because the money was so good. So what would happen to amazon if the money stopped being so good?

Is it possible that a large portion of amazon's employees are only staying for the money? If I understand correctly, a large portion of the compensation is tied to the stock price (RSUs). What happens to miserable employees' stay/go decisions if the stock price stops climbing and the total compensation effectively decreases as a result?

What happens to the stock price if a larger number of employees leave?

This does not look like a stable system to me.