I doubt it’s an effective channel for promoting liberalism (or even rationality). In North America at least the folks most engaged on Facebook tend to be media illiterate and reactionary leaning. The smart people left long ago.
I was talking about this with someone the other day… How many real terrorism threats have been preceded by the terrorist telegraphing their intentions with a phone call beforehand? My prior is that this number is essentially 0 and we should ignore bomb threats as a society.
Probably not super common but it does happen from time to time.
And imagine ignoring a bomb threat and then it's real, you probably would not want to be responsible for that.
The Weather Underground often warned the targets of their bombings via phone call. (I guess their goal was to attack gov't institutions and make a political statement, not to kill lots of people.) This was in the late '60s-'70s.
The IRA (Irish terrorists, for Americans confused at the acronym, or maybe confused at what the IRA did) did occasionally phone warnings and occasionally the information was accurate. Code words were used to authenticate the threat.
The PIRA actually do seem to have intended to give accurate warnings when they planted bombs, in Belfast at least. There were inevitably cases when the information was garbled or misunderstood but the use of codewords & the practice of delivering the warnings to a known set of media outlets was at least an attempt to minimise these.
The downside was that the vast majority of warnings were hoaxes - bomb scares were dozens of times more common than actual bombs.
The other main groups - INLA, UVF, and UFF/UDA also got in on the hoax game, but didn't often do real bombs (and didn't always give proper warnings when they did - see the UVF's Dublin & Monaghan bombings for a particularly grim example).
But real bombs were just common enough that the hoaxes from whatever source had to be taken seriously and so they caused huge amounts of disruption, probably more than anything that actually exploded.
Logically that probably makes sense, but it would require everyone in the chain of command agreeing to that policy, and there’s no way that would ever happen from a liability standpoint.
Actually no I can’t recall the last time I tried to ride a bike in the snow. But I know inherently that snow itself would be alright, but snow is almost always accompanied by a layer of ice below, which simply can’t be fine. This is the case in Canada at least.
Performing privileged work for the government in some shape or form which allows you to skirt the legal rules and makes you immune to certain issues (e.g. travel with diplomatic passport or invent fake identities to hide your real family tree). In force-colonized countries such as South Africa, the local colonial overlords openly looted the country, first in the name of the monarch and later for their own wealthy class which was still deeply connected to the European aristocracy. The colonialist class in South Africa most likely were also involved with the South African intelligence community and secret police, with all the special status this entails.
But simply focusing on five-eyes three-letter agencies is too narrow because there are thousands of "inofficial" entities surrounding them. And at least on paper if you are working in intelligence you're an idealistic government servant. History shows that most whistleblowers we read about are these kind of idealists, because they notice that not all five-eyes governments are equal. Some are monarchies, and the crown did many things which are incompatible with democratic values of US citizens and the narrative of the "American dream" they learned from Hollywood.
People always blame CIA and their black budgets, but what if CIA was actually subverted by the British crown and their colonial aristocracy?
The most famous spy in the world is James Bond, 007, not a "yankee". The British broke the Enigma and had extensive experience managing hundreds of colonies and their local populations, supposedly even introducing foreign pathogens as biological warfare on native populations.
Maxwell family was big in software and networking, especially for identity control. Epstein family was blacklisted from Hollywood due to antisemitism and moved into radio stations & broadway. Jeffrey was arrested by Scotland Yard in London and a bit earlier Jarecki was arrested in East Germany and later stationed for a very long time in Heidelberg, which is 1hr away from Thiel's official origin story, and also close to where the Trump family originated from in a different era.
Fred Trump sent youth abroad from NY area with the American Foreign Service (AFS), which during the cold war was at least relevant for national security, because each of the students could be converted into communists by foreign agencies.
When the King visited the white house, Mr. Trump was seemingly out of character and did not speak a bad word.
The connections between Trump and intelligence have really been hidden by the media, but they're quite obvious. He was running a "model agency" just like Epstein, so he was in the same business. His luxury real estate business for rich foreigners from East Europe follows the same pattern, and there he employed Felix Sater who came out publicly as a CIA operative during the "Russiagate" investigations. His businesses were in part a facade for intelligence operations. Nobody should forget Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, of all people... This explains why he makes so many moves with almost certainty of impunity.
There's documents that show Trump's father searching for a boat captain who can ship goods from Florida to New York.
I have a feeling that black folks living in the Trump-owned low-income areas were the final destination for the weapons-for-drugs trades which also included names such as Epstein and Kashoggi. Germany gets linked into this through Terramar which was used to get machinery and chemical precursor materials to a country of their choice. Famously these deals were paid in cash at the New Jersey offices of German companies - if at all.
I think the casinos were used for drug money laundering, until he got a knock on the door and stopped doing that.
Even before Trump the Epsteins were in the pageants/model industry involved with the "Miss Universe" aimed at foreign aristocrats. Coincidentally another now-famous family name in those credits is "Sweeney".
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” —Jobs
That's an incredibly cynical thing for a man like Jobs to say, given his life, especially late in it, was mostly just ordering people to invent things, and then acting like a generational genius because the massive amount of people under his purview invented things.
Why do people keep saying this? The direction of someone driving towards a thing is just as important as people working on that thing. Otherwise we may not actually have gotten anyone working on that thing at all. It's like saying a director is not important and actors should just do whatever they want.
Calling current AI subscription services (especially Claude) "flat rate" (implying infinite access for a flat fee) is misleading. There are pretty strict hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly limits. So there is a pretty easy-to-reach limit for all these subscriptions. They're hardly unlimited, and given how easy it is to run into limits, it's likely not super complicated/low-stddev for an accounting department to figure out avg cost per customer.
Within each tier, each marginal token is an expense with no marginal revenue to offset. So yes. The platonic ideal for any subscription business model is zero usage.
I run an AI subscription business and we have our pricing set in a way that we make an acceptable profit even if all users were to max out their given usage
Of course. My point is that your profit still decreases as you approach max usage, ceteris parabis. It may be acceptable but it is less. Your costs are variable and your revenue is fixed (at least on a unit basis).
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