The terminology in Aus / NZ is pet (owned by people) vs stray (socialised around people but not owned) vs feral (not socialised to people).

Generally speaking, pets & strays like people - they’ve been handled as a kittens. Pets can become strays and vice versa. But feral cats (past being a kitten) will never become stray / pet (and vice versa) - it is only the next generation that can be raised differently.

While the article is defining feral cats as any cat that isn’t a pet, in reality the vast majority of what it is talking about are truly feral cats - nothing like a house cat.

With the added complication that it’s unlikely that Mangione actually killed anyone - someone killed someone in favour with the Magats, so by their logic, someone has to be killed to send a message.

Like how likely is the story that someone (who looked nothing like the surveillance photos released at the time) was called in by restaurant staff, and despite having allegedly travelled a long distance from the scene of the crime, and many opportunities to destroy everything, had a manifesto confessing to the crime, and the murder weapon still on him? Despite him having no prior inclination towards that sort of thing even?

Hopefully any jury has good critical thinking skills and can see through an obvious set up.

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.

Interesting that they don’t say in which direction it misrepresents (is it saying it is too high or too low). Maybe they are hoping the reader will infer from what they are saying that they’re using less now, without them having to say that.

They are not wrong that Israel is radicalised. However, peace is a process, and what will lead to an enduring peace is actually more important than what is just.

If Israel was actually willing to reconcile and treat Palestinians as equals, the South African model of truth & reconciliation (including amnesty for abuses in exchange for full disclosure of what happened), it wouldn’t be just for the victims, but it would allow both sides to move on peacefully.

The real problem is that Netanyahu, Smoltrich, Ben Gvir etc… don’t actually want peace, so even a neutral truth & reconciliation is currently unlikely to happen without their backers (especially the US) forcing them.

While someone’s political beliefs are highly multi-dimensional, there are two axes that are commonly used to define where someone sits:

• Economy - Left is favouring social responsibility for people receiving economic support (supporting people to meet their basic needs is everyone’s collective responsibility), while right is favouring individual responsibility (meeting your basic needs is your responsibility, and if you die because you can’t, even if it is due to something outside of your control, tough luck).
• Social liberties - Social Libertarian is favouring individual decisions on anything not related to the economy / rights of others, while Social Authoritarianism supports government restrictions on social liberties.

Since there are independent axes, there are four quadrants:

• Socially liberal, Economic left - e.g. Left Communism, Social Democrat, most Green parties, etc…
• Socially authoritarian, Economic left - e.g. Stalin, Mao. Tankie is a slang term for people in this quadrant.
• Socially liberal, Economic right - Sometimes called libertarian. Some people with this belief set call themselves Liberal in some countries.
• Socially authoritarian, Economic right - e.g. Trump. Sometimes called conservatives.

That said, some people use tankie as cover for supporting socially authoritarian, economic right but formerly economic left countries(e.g. people who support Putin, who is not economically left in any sense).

I’m not sure why people choose Youtube as their platform to criticise big tech like Google.

And apparently enforcement of foreign judgements in the US is state-by-state, and the US state doesn’t need personal jurisdiction over the person. So any US state court can decide to recognise a foreign jurisdiction, under local state laws, and all other states will recognise it. So if OFCOM can find one state that will recognise the judgement, then they are in trouble.

I think detecting that something bad is happening, finding out how, and stopping it prevents other people from being affected. Otherwise contamination incidents could go on for years, and the cumulative exposure to affected individuals would be higher, and the number of individuals affected would also be higher.

GENEVA CONVENTION relative to the treatment of Prisoners of War of 12 August 1949 Article 52 Unless he be a volunteer, no prisoner of war may be employed on labour which is of an unhealthy or dangerous nature. No prisoner of war shall be assigned to labour which would be looked upon as humiliating for a member of the Detaining Power’s own forces. The removal of mines or similar devices shall be considered as dangerous labour.

Sometimes I wonder if they are trying to get a high score by committing every possible war crime.

Apparently the xitter tweet was a eulogy for Yahya Sinwar.

Now Yahya Sinwar was a war criminal, so they kind of have a point.

However, if that is the standard they set, saying anything positive about Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Ron Dermer, Aryeh Deri, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisonkot, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are all also leaders who have supported war crimes should also be grounds for having awards rescinded. But what are the chances that there is a double standard?

Perhaps a good approach is to check other recipients who are pro-Zionist‡ and see if they have anything praising war criminals, and complain - if there is no similar response, it is clear there is a double standard.

‡: And before anyone tries to twist my words as a smear, I define a modern Zionist in the usual way as someone who wants to expand the state of Israel beyond the 1967 boundaries, other than as a one-state solution with the consent of the people of the lands.

That catholics should practice confession is a religious belief. But the confidentiality part is from canon law - i.e. in terminology of most other organisations, it is a policy. It is a long-standing policy to punish priests for breaking it, dating back to at least the 12th century, but nonetheless the confidentiality is only a policy within a religious organisation, and not a religious belief.

Many organisations punish individuals who break their policy. But if an organisation has a policy, and insist that it be followed even when following it is contrary to the law, and would do immense harm to vulnerable individuals, then I think it is fair to call that organisation evil - and to hold them culpable for harm resulting from that policy.

Even if the confidentiality itself was a core part of the religious belief itself, religious freedom does not generally extend to violating the rights of others, even if the religion demands it. Engaging in violent jihad, for example, is not a protected right even in places where religious freedom cannot be limited, even if the person adheres to a sect that requires it.

IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:

An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:

(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and

(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.

I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:

• The employee is not required to spend, it is only a factor in promotions and not retaining the same role. OP said you can “get in trouble for not using this” - countering this defence perhaps depends on proving what kind of trouble to show it is a requirement. In addition, under s340, employers are not allowed to take an adverse action against an employee for exercising or proposing to exercise a workplace right, and adverse action includes discriminating between and employee and other employees of the employer.
• That the employee is not required to pay any particular person, they can choose what to buy as long as the select from a prescribed list. However, I think that could be countered by saying this is an indirect requirement to spend, and the “or another person” attaches to the “pay” part, so I don’t think that argument would fly.
• The the requirement is reasonable - however, that could be countered by arguing the privacy angle, and the fact that this is for personal shopping, far outside the reasonable scope of an employment relationship.
• That the payment isn’t for the benefit of the employer. I think that could be countered firstly by arguing this is a requirement to spend not pay, and event if it was to pay, it is indirectly for the employer’s benefit since it allows them to attract and retain clients. The way they are pushing it could further prove this.

So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.

Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.

If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.

I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.

Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,

(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.

So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:

(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or

It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.

They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:

(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or

So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.

The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site

That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.

To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.

As an experiment / as a bit of a gag, I tried using Claude 3.7 Sonnet with Cline to write some simple cryptography code in Rust - use ECDHE to establish an ephemeral symmetric key, and then use AES256-GCM (with a counter in the nonce) to encrypt packets from client->server and server->client, using off-the-shelf RustCrypto libraries.

It got the interface right, but it got some details really wrong:

• It stored way more information than it needed in the structure tracking state, some of it very sensitive.
• It repeatedly converted back and forth between byte arrays and the proper types unnecessarily - reducing type safety and making things slower.
• Instead of using type safe enums it defined integer constants for no good reason.
• It logged information about failures as variable length strings, creating a possible timing side channel attack.
• Despite having a 96 bit nonce to work with (-1 bit to identify client->server and server->client), it used a 32 bit integer to represent the sequence number.
• And it “helpfully” used wrapping_add to increment the 32 sequence number! For those who don’t know much Rust and/or much cryptography: the golden rule of using ciphers like GCM is that you must never ever re-use the same nonce for the same key (otherwise you leak the XOR of the two messages). wrapping_add explicitly means when you get up to the maximum number (and remember, it’s only 32 bits, so there’s only about 4.3 billion numbers) it silently wraps back to 0. The secure implementation would be to explicitly fail if you go past the maximum size for the integer before attempting to encrypt / decrypt - and the smart choice would be to use at least 64 bits.
• It also rolled its own bespoke hash-based key extension function instead of using HKDF (which was available right there in the library, and callable with far less code than it generated).

To be fair, I didn’t really expect it to work well. Some kind of security auditor agent that does a pass over all the output might be able to find some of the issues, and pass it back to another agent to correct - which could make vibe coding more secure (to be proven).

But right now, I’d not put “vibe coded” output into production without someone going over it manually with a fine-toothed comb looking for security and stability issues.

• Measles estimated case-fatality rate: 1.3%
• Estimated US population: 346,715,067
• Measles deaths if everyone in the US got measles: 4,507,295
• Upper limit on estimated MMR vaccine caused anaphylaxis: 0.000066%
• Anaphylaxis case-fatality rate: 0.3%
• Estimated vaccine-caused fatality rate: 1.98 * 10^-7 %
• Estimate vaccine-caused fatalities avoided by not vaccinating US population: 0.69
• Net increase in fatalities from switching to measles natural immunity for everyone in the US: 4,507,294

So it would only be better if he wants an extra 4.5 million Americans to die.

Legally, he’s not even allowed to drive.

I think more like the SS advises the president not to drive for their own safety, and to leave it to experts.

Or as Trump probably sees it: The deep state is being insufficiently loyal and trying to tell him - the president - of all people - what to do. So he totally shouldn’t listen, and should drive if he wants to, and they should fall in line or be fired.

Years of carefully curated anti-intellectualism in every bit of media they consume, because facts didn’t suit the wealthy (smoking is bad for you, fossil fuels are destroying the planet, private prisons drive more recidivism are facts that get in the way of someone making lots of money). Those fighting facts that aren’t on their side have embraced a number of other groups with anti-intellectual elements (white supremecists / neo-nazis / anti-woke, religious, anti-vaxxers, natural health advocates) to create alliances of anti-intellectual thought.

This has driven increasing polarisation in the US; 49% of republicans approved of JFK as president, and 49% of democrats approved of Eisenhower. It went down over time - other party approval was 30% of Carter, 31% of Reagan. There was a break in the pattern (44% for Bush Senior), but back on track to 27% for Clinton, 23% for Bush, 13% for Obama, 7% for Trump (first round), and 6% for Biden. So in other words, Americans are so polarised that they’ll vote for whoever their side puts up, and for one side, being anti-intellectual is actually seen as a strength.

I think many of the people who started the anti-intellectualism ball rolling on purpose are wealthy neoliberals who believe in laissez-faire free trade as a fundamental value, and so there is a certain aspect of ‘leopards ate my face’ to this leading to the anti-intellectualism extending back to rejection of mainstream economics (even though the neoliberals’ preferred theory is notoriously flawed, Trump’s approach to pulling economic levers is wholesale rejection of all theory rather than replacing it with something less flawed).

The FBI pressured Apple to create an encryption backdoor to bypass their security features

This was more like a hardware security device backdoor - the key was in a hardware security device, that would only release it after receiving the PIN (without too many wrong attempts). But the hardware accepts signed firmware from Apple - and the firmware decides the rules like when to release the key. So this was effectively a backdoor only for Apple, and the FBI wanted to use it.

Systems would create a public audit trail whenever a backdoor is used, allowing independent auditors to monitor and report misuse of backdoors.

This has limits. If there is a trusted central party who makes sure there is an audit log before allowing the backdoor (e.g. the vendor), they could be pressured to allow access without the audit log.

If it is a non-interactive protocol in a decentralised system, someone can create all the records to prove the audit logs have been created, use the backdoor, but then just delete the audit logs and never submit them to anyone else.

The only possibility without a trusted central party is an interactive protocol. This could work as: For a message (chat message, cryptocurrency transaction etc…) to be accepted by the other participants, they must submit a zero-knowledge proof that the transaction includes an escrow key divided into 12 parts (such that any 8 of 12 participants can combine their shares to decrypt the key), encrypted with the public keys of 12 enrolled ‘jury’ members - who would need to be selected based on something like the hash of all messages up to that point. The jury members would be secret in that the protocol could be designed so the jury keys are not publicly linked to specific users. The authority could decrypt data by broadcasting a signed audit log requesting decryption of certain data, and jury members would receive credits for submitting a share of the escrow key (encrypted so only the authority could read it) along with a zero-knowledge proof that it is a valid and non-duplicate escrow key. Of course, the person sending the message could jury shop by waiting until the next message will have the desired jury, and only sending it then. But only 8/12 jurors need to be honest. There is also a risk jurors would drop out and not care about credits, or be forced to collude with the authority.

Cryptographic Enforcement: Technical solutions could ensure that the master key is unusable if certain conditions—such as an invalid warrant or missing audit trail—are not met.

Without a trusted central party (or trusted hardware playing the same role), this seems like it would require something like Blackbox Obfuscation, which has been proven to be impossible. The best possibility would be an interactive protocol that would need enough people to collude to break it.

I have submitted a DEIA role report to [email protected] giving my feelings about how DEIA roles are useful, and I’d encourage everyone to do the same. To help ensure it gets read, pick a subject that makes it hard to tell if it is a report of a person vs your feelings.