Privacy-conscious apps and communications tools need to be developed, and we need to build the consensus that privacy is important.
edit: Anyone know why Briar doesn't have the feature for known contacts to be a "courier" for other contacts?
Background: Briar is the encrypted messaging app that works over tor, local wifi and bluetooth. If Alice sends a message to Charles but she isn't connected, the app will hold it until it detects Alice and Charles are in proximity.
My desired feature: If Bob is a verified contact with both Alice and Charles, Briar should be able to hand the message from Alice to Bob, and then deliver it to Charles.
The Constitution is not fine. You are correct that it is not being enforced properly, and IMO we have a coup being staged in real time.
We should have rolling term limits for SCOTUS.
We should have ranked-choice/multiple-choice mechanisms for all elections to facilitate a true multiparty system.
We should further regulate money and transparency in spending vis-a-vis political advertising.
We should ban gerrymandering.
The Senate should be weakened or entirely removed. I am aware that is theoretically the only thing that is not amendable, but it's a flaw that we have it in any case.
The Electoral College should be discarded.
And clearly, impeachment should be easier than it is - or else maybe we just have the dictatorship we deserve? Thanks, GOP.
Your democratically elected president (or, rather, the group behind him) is undoing whatever was left of the democratic apparatus. There is no counter power in place. Executive, legislative and judiciary are de facto one.
You seem to operate on the belief that democratically elected leaders can't do harm to democracy, while history has times and times again proved you wrong, and that to me is what's insane here.
> He's the democratically elected president of the US
“Dictator” and “elected” are not incompatible. In fact, the term originates as the title of an elected (not directly by the citizenry, but then neither is the US President in any case) officer, and the term has nothing to do with how you got into power, but with what practical constraints it is exercised.
I mean sure. But he's not even doing anything dictatorial. Most of his actions are well within the laws of the United States. Not more than any other president.
If the reports are true, the proceeds from selling Venezuelan oil are going into his own Qatari bank account. That's third-world tinpot dictatorship right there.
Those takes are informed and level headed. We have a wildly unqualified Secretary of Defense who was appointed only because he advocated in his book "American Crusade" for a crusade against the "American Left". A Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts described us as in the middle of a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it. And he said that before the election.
The DOGE project was a wildly unconstitutional overreach of the executive branch, shutting down or severely crippling agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the approval of Congress.
Republicans are letting Trump act like a dictator to accomplish things they want outside of the guardrails of our democracy. There are plenty more examples out there if you choose to pay attention.
> There is no dictatorship ... He's the democratically elected
The first part does not follow from the second. It's much easier to become dictator when in power, e.g. after being democratically elected. It's a common route. See also Self-coup / autocoup (1).
Of course, nothing like that could even be attempted in the USA! (2) /s
Uhhhhh... What? Are we living on the same planet? The Senate is absolutely terrible. Not only is it breathtakingly undemocratic, the modern rise of the filibuster raising the threshold to 60% makes it even harder to pass any legislation.
The weakness of the Senate has abetted the expansion of the other two branches as Congress has ceded most of its lawmaking responsibilities. But there are still limits. There are so many other knock on negative effects too: inability to pass laws leads to more enormous omnibus bills, increasing the influence of lobbyists.
Simply deleting the Senate entirely would go a very long way to improving the structure of the US govt.
Edit: incidentally, the main thing I've learned over the years about this topic is that most Americans (not necessarily you specifically) have simply never questioned the received wisdom about the US Constitution that they learned in grade school and are maybe even incapable of evaluating it dispassionately.
In a hyper-partisan age, it seems good to have some collegiality and requirements for cross-partisan cooperation.
If we can't agree on anything then maybe we shouldn't do anything. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Why are so many people so desperate to move here if things are going so badly? Much of the discontent is performative. How willing would you actually be to give up your spot and switch places with someone in Guatemala?
Maybe we need filibuster-style restraints for the executive too. Executive overreach is a major complaint people have about the current structure, correct?
https://fairvote.org has info on Ranked Choice Voting. It is, to me, the single most bang-for-buck reform we should have in government.
A voting system where voters give preferences to multiple candidates on a ballot takes away the "spoiler effect", where a candidate too similar to the two main candidates will split the vote.
We need a freer market of political parties for a number of reasons. People need to feel like political change is possible. The two main parties need more pressure to evolve or die within their section of the political spectrum. Allowing more political parties to exist allows splinter parties to have a chance. Imagine a "sane Republican" party, or a progressive party, or some hybrid-centrist party that likes unions and public education but doesn't like massive social services, and so on.
MAGA would be polling at 15% or less, I think.
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SCOTUS term limits is just an idea I heard once. Most other democracies have it in place.
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I am skeptical of the Senate's utility in a modern federal government - the difference between the population of Virginia and Rhode Island was far less extreme than the difference between California and Wyoming today. The electoral inequality is too much.
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Electoral college has to go for obvious reasons, as does gerrymandering.
None of your opinion on the power of government requires the people to be cut out of the equation.
One could have a "small" federal government while having a popular vote for president and a reduced/discarded Senate.
And no, not everyone likes it when the federal government is "too big". Personally, I support social welfare and research programs at the federal level, as well as food safety and many other administrative functions there too.
I'm less supportive of "big government" when the executive declares itself the arbiter of the Constitution and all foreign wars and treaties.
Why does social welfare need to be handled at the federal level? There seems to be no explanation for why people insist on this other than that it must be so.
Even as of today, California gives aid to many states who fundamentally disagree with California's culture. Make social welfare state level and some states will simply starve.
It's like insurance: we all need to pool together and help everyone. And for it to work, we can't complain that some people get more help than others. It's a safety net, not floor. If everyone hit the net, the entire thing collapses quickly.
2nd reason is that people can move between the states easily. Imagine the logistical disaster of having a California worker work for a New York company. Which social security does this workers wages get deposited to? What if the worker moves to Arizona? What if the New York company opens a branch in Florida and that worker's department operates out of there?
It's a mess across state lines, and traditionally we have state disputes handled at the federal level.
> 2nd reason is that people can move between the states easily
There is no requirement that states have to let anyone in without any action. California can easily levy a tax so high that only contributing people can enter. They don't want to....
Social welfare needs to be handled at the same level that mobility exists, because otherwise all destitute people will bumrush the nearest jurisdiction that is giving out generous welfare benefits. The issue is most often seen at the city level (e.g. Bellevue “encouraging” homeless to go to Seattle), but more generous policies like housing-first will need to be federally administered to prevent the most generous states from getting bumrushed.
I have a duxtop induction burner and I notice it gets hotspots where the coils are. I wonder if the breville control freak is worth the money or it has better granularity of its heating element.
But yeah if I built a new house, I would have an induction top.
Oh, this is so benign and appropriate. This will never escalate, and OpenAI is governed by strict privacy laws and audited by the public so we can trust they won't ever change their policy or have bias injected into their models.
I work in infosec and several popular platforms use elasticsearch for log storage and analysis.
I would never. Ever. Bet my savings on ES being stable enough to always be online to take in data, or predictable in retaining the data it took in.
It feels very best-effort and as a consultant, I recommend orgs use some other system for retaining their logs, even a raw filesystem with rolling zips, before relying on ES unless you have a dedicated team constantly monitoring it.
Do you happen to know if ES was the only storage? Its been almost 8 years, but if I was building a log storage and analysis system, then I'd push the logs to S3 or some other object store and build an ES index off of that S3 data. From the consumer's perspective, it may look like we're using ES to store the data, but we have a durable backup to regenerate ES if necessary.
Searchable snapshots in Elasticsearch can be backed by S3 and they perform very well. No need to store the data on hot nodes any longer than it takes for the index to do a rollover, and from then it's all S3.
Even most toy databases "built in a weekend" can be very stable for years if:
- No edge-case is thrown at them
- No part of the system is stressed ( software modules, OS,firmware, hardware )
- No plug is pulled
Crank the requests to 11 or import a billion rows of data with another billion relations and watch what happens. The main problem isn't the system refusing to serve a request or throwing "No soup for you!" errors, it's data corruption and/or wrong responses.
To be fair, I think it is chronically underprovisioned clusters that get overwhelmed by log forwarding. I wasn't on the team that managed the ELK stack a decade ago, but I remember our SOC having two people whose full time job was curating the infrastructure to keep it afloat.
Now I work for a company whose log storage product has ES inside, and it seems to shit the bed more often than it should - again, could be bugs, could be running "clusters" of 1 or 2 instead of 3.
>The argument is that people recklessly driving their vehicles with a total disregard for the lives around them are a danger to the people in front of their car and anyone else on the street
And my argument is that no matter what SCOTUS law one cites, or hand-waving about self-defense that is said, that shooting her in the head from the side of the car was not only tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse in a way that a competent person should immediately recognize.
One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.
>The minute you choose to endanger people around you in the presence of people with guns, you’ve rolled the dice on your life.
This is shorthand for "comply or die". Welcome to the free world. I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.
> I wonder if Europe and Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the world know what they're missing by not having LEO as qualified as ICE running their streets.
"Europe" is of course not a place, but maybe you'd be surprised to know this does happen in "Europe" and other countries. In fact France specifically legalized police shooting vehicles fleeing traffic stops even if the police themselves are not in danger, and about a dozen people are killed that way every year.
Heck, here's a video of a shooting in Canada where the police fired at someone just trying to get away:
> One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.
She accelerated her car before turning the wheels knowing people were in the path of her car. (Even if you argue that the wheels spinning before the wheels turn doesn't count, cars do not turn rotate on their central axis, so accelerating while turning still endangers people in front of the car.) Nobody can read her mind but the possible consequences of that action are obvious. Legally that constitutes intent, regardless of what we might want to project on her state of mind.
Further, if you do want to talk about state of mind, you cannot argue that any person behaving rationally would choose to commit a felony and flee from LEO in a vehicle in the first place. This is an extremely high-risk move for zero benefit and the video confirms it didn't even take place out of panic, which was my original thought. On the ground in that situation there can be no analysis of "what is she thinking" because she abandoned the reasonable course that anyone there would have expected her to take.
> that shooting her in the head
No confirmed gunshot wound is in her head. Where did you hear this? It appears the ICE officer fired center of mass, as two confirmed gunshot wounds are in her chest and one in her arm.
I realize that arguing these technical issues will not change your mind, because for you the emotion of "people dying is bad" trumps all the reasons it happened. But I hope it will get you to consider what other people are thinking.
> tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse
That isn't clear at all because you cannot know what the counterfactual is. There were armed people who could have shot James Fields before he accelerated into a crowd. If they had, Heather Heyer would be alive today. If they had shot him, then people would be making the same argument you're making. Hitting the gas while your car is surrounded by people is no different than firing a gun randomly. In the very best case, your are operating a deadly weapon with a total disregard for human life. In some situations (self-defense), that may be justified. But it is not innocent.
The way to stop this from happening is to stop encouraging people to commit crimes by interfering with law enforcement. There are other effective ways to protest. Another good start would be winning elections. Encouraging people to get into violent encounters with law enforcement is risking peoples' lives for nothing. Once you choose violence you don't know where it's going to go.
I highly disagree with your analysis. And yes, some of my perspective is based on the ideology that the ICE agents are largely incompetent, racist, hateful human beings led by people of the same quality.
You are correct, she didn't get shot in the head, she was shot in the chest and lived for 20 minutes while she was denied medical attention.
Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word. A woman blocked the street, got killed then called a f*cking b*tch by the cop after he shot her, and a domestic terrorist before her body was cold by the DHS secretary and president and vice president.
You say she shouldn't have been there. I say ICE shouldn't have been there, shouldn't have issued conflicting orders, shouldn't have gotten in front of her car, and should have kept going around her like they had been. I say her demeanor before she left meant she clearly was not trying to harm anyone. Period.
There were no conflicting orders, unless you mean ICE telling her to get out of the car while Good's partner yells "drive, baby drive!"
> shouldn't have gotten in front of her car,
It certainly would have been smarter for the ICE agent on a personal welfare level, but the idea that the cops have to leave you an escape route is silly. It's policy mostly for police safety; from everyone elses' standpoint, you don't get to say "the cops have stopped me and I don't have a way out so I have no choice but to run them over."
> Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word.
Right, well, I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed. I mean, that's what fascist thugs do. Instead, Good and her partner appear to have been caught totally off guard, with her partner demanding to know why they had real bullets. There's a disconnect somewhere.
Anyway, I guess one of my overarching points is that this is not actually unusual police behavior, even by international standards. It's getting so much attention because of its political salience. I don't know (and doubt) there is any coordination going on, but in these situations I think people should always ask themselves why: a) this event, like many others, is incorrectly being treated as unprecedented or beyond the norm and b) why it is so emotionally charged when similar past events were not, c) whether the emotionality is productive at all personally and d) whether the outrage is likely to lead to desirable political consequences. For a closely related example in the lattermost question, I am no lover of cops, but it appears the actual political results of the BLM protests were highly mixed, at best, and in some cases made things worse. So, for example, returning to a situation where we have immigration laws and minimal enforcement is clearly not a desirable end for anyone except maybe some classes of businessmen.
It got a lot of attention because it is death, because it was avoidable, because it was the responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable, and because popular tension breaks at unpredictable moments. Hers happened to be on video from a thousand different angles.
Your rhetoric waffles between support of the actions of the authorities, and you seem to drift between satire and reality. "I'm no lover of cops" while you victim blame a woman for getting killed.
>I think it's pretty clear that anyone who is out protesting and resisting the incompetent, hateful, and violent thugs of a fascist regime should absolutely, 100% expect to be killed
Given the amount of energy you are expending to defending the actions of officers in this instance, I assume you are a supporter of this administration and their actions.
Feel free to post a video showing the conflicting orders. As best I can determine, this was just early (and very typical) misinformation. I could be wrong!
> responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable
I disagree. I don't see that LEOs have some sort of moral responsibility to make sure they aren't standing where they can be run over. People have a moral responsibility to not drive recklessly.
> "I'm no lover of cops" while you victim blame a woman for getting killed.
It is certainly an unfortunate situation, but if you can set aside your moral outrage, looking at the chain of cause-and-effect, she definitely took actions that had a very high probability of leading to being shot. Do you disagree? I don't see how looking at this shooting from a moral framing is sensible or likely to be productive in any way regardless of which side "wins" and is able to execute policy based on it.
> It got a lot of attention because it is death, because it was avoidable, because it was the responsibility of ICE to make it avoidable, and because popular tension breaks at unpredictable moments
See, I don't think it's actually unpredictable at all. There are very good reasons there aren't mass riots in Canada over police not in any particular danger shooting up someone driving a stolen truck, and there are for Americans ICE shooting a woman who, at best, disobeyed clear instructions and operated her vehicle with a reckless disregard for human life.
First: I do not believe immigration laws should be enforced in their entirety vis-a-vis mass deportation. Decades of flawed immigration laws, flawed employment laws and flawed enforcement have led to the current situation where millions of people are in this country undocumented, who are otherwise law-abiding, decent people who contribute to their communities and love the US. The rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on society are flawed at best, and hatefully wrong and bad faith at worst.
Second: If we want to get a handle on immigration volume and change the system so fewer people are undocumented, the correct response logistically and morally is to create a path to legal status (not citizenship) for those currently here, who have been here for a long time, who have families and who have not committed violent crime.
Third: If someone wanted to maximize the effectiveness of immigration enforcement resources for the purpose of safety using deportation, they would still be doing targeting of violent offenders. They clearly are not. Stephen Miller wants all undocumented people out of this country because he is a white supremacist. When "moderating forces" in the administration tried to push back on raids at farms and factories, Miller angrily protested and got Trump to change his mind back to indiscriminate mass deportation.
Third, pt 2: If Republicans were serious about measured but effective reforms to reduce immigration, they would have accepted the 2024 legislative package that capped asylum volume and vastly increased border patrol and border judiciary resources to expedite cases and get people back out of the country in a fraction of the time the current system requires. Instead, they wanted to win the 2024 election with immigration as a wedge issue, and they want to pursue a maximalist position of fear and mass removal.
Fourth: The US federal government is a semi-democracy. We have a single-choice, no-runoff election system in most of the country that forces an extremist-friendly two party system, and the presidential election is further removed from popular choice by the electoral college. The president is the least "democratic" elected position in the nation. I do not think most people support the extent of the violence and maximalism of the administration.
Fifth: The surveillance technology being adopted by the government is not being used solely on undocumented citizens.
Finally: If I were in charge and wanted to take a stance on immigration, I would do largely what was in the 2024 bill, I would set up a work visa program for industries that heavily utilize undocumented labor, and I would target recent arrivals and criminals for deportation - not all undocumented residents.
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TLDR:
We're arresting and deporting veterans, PhD students critical of US policy, and people who have lived here for decades as part of the "American Dream" who have done no harm to our country. What is being done is not in the name of safety nor does it even indirectly improve the lives of Americans. Surveillance and tracking tools are being deployed against all citizens. In the broader context of the behavior and statements of Miller/Trump/Vance et al, this is part of a multi-pronged attack on democracy and the freedom of citizens from government intrusion.
Edit: and all of this debate is without the context of an administration that has declared itself above the law domestically and internationally, that has invaded a country for oil and is currently preparing to invade a treaty member of our strongest military alliance to steal their natural resources. So if the parent wonders why some people are hostile at debating this, it's because to debate the point at all is to ignore obvious truths.
>The rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on society are flawed at best, and hatefully wrong and bad faith at worst.
Ironically all the big wealthy GOP donors all hire illegal laborers to clean their homes and mow their lawns, and to maintain the golf courses at clubs they belong to. But we can't actually have the conversation about illegal immigration get to the root causes of why immigrants are actually here, now can we?
> Stephen Miller wants all undocumented people out of this country because he is a white supremacist.
Another point of irony - most of the ardent white nationalists from the heartland of America would be aghast to learn that Miller is a rich Jew from Southern California whose grandparents were immigrants. For a lot of them, Jews are explicitly NOT white nor are they American.
> If Republicans were serious about measured but effective reforms to reduce immigration, they would have accepted the 2024 legislative package that capped asylum volume and vastly increased border patrol and border judiciary resources to expedite cases and get people back out of the country in a fraction of the time the current system requires.
Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers.
> Or, even earlier, they could have backed e-Verify as federal minimum standard for all employment as far back as the 1980s. But no, let's not go after the businesses hiring illegal laborers.
Strong borders are entirely about making easy to exploit cheap labor. That's entirely the reason why neither democrats nor republicans have addressed immigration. It's also entirely the reason why the only lever being pulled is deportation.
Businesses simply love being able to say to workers "Do what we say or we'll have you deported".
This is why undocumented workers pay taxes and can get jobs, even in the reddest of states. It's not some sort of "flaw" or "impossibility" that couldn't be fixed pretty quickly.
Rightly targeted law would penalize businesses hiring undocumented workers and would protect the workers regardless of documentation status. Doing that would immediately fix any perceived problems with immigration.
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