Kid, we found your name on an envelope under a half a ton of garbage.

No.

It isn’t a defense at all. You said you didn’t understand. Abused people (or peoples) becoming abusive in turn is a common process, and that phrase is commonly used in such a way that searching on it will reveal many studies of the process, and what has been tried (successfully and unsuccessfully) to short-circuit it.

Understanding is not absolution, though. You can both see how the genocide of Jews led to fears, politics, and colonial interventions that contributed to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, and also condemn that genocide and those perpetrating it (which I absolutely do). But not understanding the motivations makes any problem easier to effectively resist or solve, as you can use that knowledge to determine where and how to apply pressure and create a lasting rather than a temporary change.

Hurt people hurt people.

Followup article

The worst part is they may weasel out of it. If the claim was “it detects 98% of AI generated samples” it could do that while having a high false positive rate. I hate this timelime.

Power off to get the full security benefits of disk encryption.

They could have imposed up to €55 billion across the two companies. That doubles for repeat offenders. This was clearly meant as a warning.

That still doesn’t follow. For every mole of particles dissolved in a liter of water, the boiling point of water increases by about 0.5°C.

Can’t pardon civil contempt. The judge declared probable cause for criminal contempt, and crimes can be pardoned

At which point they stop being nazis

I was skeptical of your numbers, so I did the math:

Taking the first article I found newer than 2022, US billionaires have about $6.22 trillion of wealth ± recent stock market changes. UBI of $1000/month is most commonly estimated to cost $4 trillion/year.

US budget in 2024 was 6.8 trillion, but 1.87 trillion is in social security and income security programs UBI would replace, so the net change would raise the budget by 2.17 trillion to 8.39T. So 8.896 months - more like nine months than eight, but surprisingly close.

Of course, that assumes all other taxes are wiped out, which nobody has ever proposed. I can’t find a number anywhere for total income tax paid by billionaires, so we’ll be generous. OMB estimates billionaires pay an average tax rate of only 8.2%. Their wealth increased 2.9 trillion over 7 years, so ignore compounding and call it 414B/yr. And pretend it’s all taxed (which it isn’t - most isn’t considered income). That’s 33.9B in income taxes the IRS doesn’t collect after wiping out the billionaires. That reduces IRS revenues collected from 5.1T to 5.06T (being generous again with the rounding). That buys us another 7 months of government funding.

Alternatively, doubling the effective tax rate on the top 1% earning over 3.3M/yr from 26.09% to 52.18% would balance the budget including the new UBI. Get the effective tax rate on billionaires to match and you can start paying off the national debt. All without touching the middle class or even lowering anyone’s income below 1.65M/yr.

Don’t get me wrong - taxing billionaires out of existence is certainly a moral imperative - it just isn’t necessary to fund UBI.

Staple it to job applications too. I suspect many blue state and private schools would see it as a commendation.

I’m not so sure. I’d take a sock full of quarters over a sock with a 3.5" spinning disc hard drive in it any day of the week.

This is an article about an article. The original Atlantic article that contains the messages themselves is here

Please don’t spread FUD. That memo does NOT claim Signal has been compromised by Russia.

The actual claim is that Russia has used deceptive e-mail style tactics to trick people into authorizing a malicious “linked devices” request. This is a social engineering vulnerability, not a technical one.

Unsecure ≠ Insecure

Unsecure in this context generally means not in compliance with military and classified security practices and procedures for “securing” information.

Signal is secure in the sense of being strong end-to-end cryptography.

Org Mode.

I’m generally a vim user, but for job-related task management I set up emacs with evil (too many) years ago. There were vim plugins to reimplement pieces of it, but none of them covered all the functions I would use (that may have changed in the last decade, but I have a working system so it wasn’t worth the effort to check). I add tasks, tag priorities, and set recurrences for maintenance tasks. For billable or potentially billable tasks I use the built in clocking.

I make relevant notes under the tasks as I work on them, keep the finished task until weekly manager meetings, then archive them so they don’t clutter my working file but remain searchable if ever needed (which is more often than you might think).

I add new tasks at the top. Unfinished lower priority tasks get pushed down out of sight over time. When we hit a slow period, I review them and archive anything no longer relevant, then reprioritize and start working through the backlog.

Vim has its own plugin system that can provide all of the things on your list. Most people used to use a plugin manager like vim-plug or pathogen, but plugins can also be installed manually.

With vim 8 there is built in plugin management. Just open the editor and type

:help packages

Plugins (including the plugin managers which are plugins themselves) get installed in your user’s home directory, so you can install them yourself without affecting other users or involving the sysadmins who are giving you pushback on installing other applications system-wide.

Israel’s record on that one is going to be tough to beat.