that should really apply to all vehicles, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a new vehicle on the market in the US that doesn't have surveillance tech built in.
Absolutely. But this has an extra layer of urgency. Their entire goal is to be able to remotely turn off all of our infrastructure, which is handy leverage if you're looking to do things like invading a certain island nation.
Walmart is deep in surveillance tech. The store I worked at now has TV screens near the cash registers showing off their tracking (live camera feed with those tracking boxes or whatever drawn around people.) Once when I was using self check out, it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
> it thought I was trying to steal something and replayed video of the scan where it thought I scanned one time and bagged multiple.
Kroger had this too, which made every shopping trip take dramatically longer because the employees would already take 5-10 minutes to come over when they didn't have to reset every self-checkout every other item.
I refuse to shop anywhere that has them. We already have to deal with the constant "Please place item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in the bagging area.", why do we need extra aggravation when it's only going to slightly slow down a very specific class of shoplifter?
I've dealt with both; anecdotal but I had a much better experience with the individual landlord than corporate. Ex: AC went out in both cases; Individual land lord showed up with a replacement window unit the next day after I reported it. Corpo landleech ignored my ticket and calls for 3 days while I slept in a house that was nearly 90F inside past midnight.
Corpo landleeches nickle and dime you (base rent + rent payment fee + pest control fee + trash fee + valet trash fee + fee for the service that bills water/sewage + mail room fee + others I'm no doubt forgetting) (but they only advertise the base rent), and they like to push straight up scams ( such as forcing mandatory renters insurance at 3x the market rate, expensive "benefits" packages with everything from HVAC filter delivery to credit monitoring, all heavily marked up.). The individual land lord? just a flat rent every month, no surprises.
I'm sure there are plenty of horror stories about individual landlords though; the same greed drives both to cut corners and maximize profits.
The two times I’ve stayed in an apartment complex, they had staff onsite and repairmen and someone on call. The individual landlord doing this on the side is likely undercapitalized and operating on thin margins and not budgeting for repairs
The difference here comes from the distinction between corporate landlords that actually want a sustainable business, and corporate landlords that know they will never make the money back for either rent control or market reasons and so only care about extracting as much money as possible before the building falls apart.
The overwhelming majority of landleeches in the US do not have to deal with rent control. It's a completely irrelevant outside of NYC and few counties spread out across the union.
I can tell you that the suburb to a mid city on the eastern seaboard I lived in did not have rent control, but rentals in the $12-1600 range with pest and mold infestation are in great abundance. I'm sure it'd be a total surprise to hear that I live in a state that skews hard in favor of landlords and offers next to no protections for tenants, because you know, deregulation always works out for the little guy, right?
And that’s why rent control is bad. Why wouod I invest money to keep up a building where I knew I couldn’t get market rates for rent if I were a landlord?
Do you imagine rent control is ubiquitous, and landlords nationwide are crushed under the heavy handed regulation of big government?
Because that could not be further from the truth. I'd that bet without googling, you can't name more than one jurisdiction in the entirety of the US that has rent control.
I was a landlord in GA - definitely not a liberal utopia - and if you do everything right, it still takes 5-6 steps in sequence and around 60 days to evict someone for non payment and it’s another long process to get any money out of someone for unpaid rent and damages once you evict them.
>There's lots of affordable homes they're just located where no one wants to live
It's probably more accurate to say "they're just located where no one can get a job." You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern. Although if you're in medicine there is probably hope.
If only technology had progressed to an extent that we don't psychically need to be concentrated in 15-20 HCOL major metro areas to do most (if not all) office jobs.
> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from the subway at the local truck stop, or whatever labor gig you can get at the local industrial concern
There's certainly SWE jobs in LCOL places but even if there weren't, one's savings from a HCOL area should go pretty far in a LCOL one. Also, thinking that you can't get a mortgage off working at Subway in a small town is just out of touch. You'd probably have to work a lot longer than a cushy SWE job, but it's still possible.
> You can give up you SWE job or whatever and move to a small town/rural area, but you're not going to convince anyone to give you a mortgage off your income from
It's strange to me that moving to LCOL wasn't a much bigger thing during the period when everyone was working remotely.
It seems to me that moving to lower cost-of-living cities did have a remote work boom, but it wasn’t evenly distributed. People from HCOL areas still wanted a high level of services (restaurant, airport, healthcare, recreation opportunities, etc) and probably a cool “vibe”. So the people fleeing SF and LA didn’t move to Dayton and Topeka and Duluth, but they did go to Boise and Bozeman and Asheville.
Replace personal PCs with thin clients that give you an RDP session to Azure? I'm pretty sure a cloud only / subscription based "agentic" OS is the goal for windows. And, conveniently, hardware prices are through the roof until (hopefully) the AI bubble pops.
This - they already renamed remote desktop to Windows App on my work Mac so the next step is just offering "secure computing environmens" for their corporate customers.
Uhh AI bros are promising Wall Street they're going to eliminate wages while telling us we're on the precipice of a workless utopia (while also being in bed with the far right who want to destroy anything resembling a social safety net.) That's not even taking into account the Theil/Yarvin/Musk/Trump/etc techno-fuedalist aspirations ("Freedom" cities)
I love the tech, and despise the people pushing it and how they want to use it. What should be used to free us from some work and allow us to focus more on human things (family, arts) and science, instead will be used to further divide and subjugate us, all in the interest of shifting more wealth and power from the working class up to those who have both in abundance.
The worst part is that AI is getting blamed for this. It's not why these things are happening.
1) Trump's spending on tax (last term) has caused a severe recession
2) Trump's recession is causing people to fire workers, BUT CEOs and ... don't want to admit it is because revenue's dropping and about to drop more, ie. because management is close to being forced to report a total disaster of a quarterly report. So no, you're fired "because AI can do your job" (meanwhile actual demonstrations of AI actually doing a single minimum-wage job ... even OpenAI "for some reason" doesn't demonstrate that)
What people don't seem to get is that AI's history of overpromising and underdelivering is about 3x as long as the one for Nuclear Fusion.
Yes, we must submit and capitulate to Russia at every turn, or face war. Good plan.
Russia would deny any involvement, right? So throwing the crew in prison for a few decades and scrapping the ship aren't actions against Russia. They're not a party to this at all.
That's the classic warmonger argument: Call people who disagree 'chicken' and 'coward', like high school taunts.
There are many other solutions, and if you read the experts, that's what rational governments pursue. It's not as emotionally satisfying as starting a war, but it's far more satisfying than what comes after that start.
Warfare, as anyone who has experienced it, is a catastrophe win or lose or stalemate. The victors of WWII put extraordinary effort into preventing future wars, including outlawing it, creating the UN and EU, rebuilding their former enemy's economies, etc.
What do you know about warfare that they don't? Were they cowards? Naive or innocent about evil?
I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from, but regardless, folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them? And, how is that aggression towards them not warmongering? If Russia isn't responsible for these attacks on infrastructure, then no one should have a problem with the crew being tossed in prison and the boat being chopped up and turned into patio furniture or repurposed as a reef. If they are responsible, then they're the warmongers; only a fundamentally dishonest person would suggest a measured response to or self defense against an attack is warmongering.
btw
i'm not even suggesting anyone go to war with russia. But more than likely capitulation is going to fail and russia will cross a line with their acts of sabotage and terrorism in Europe (or they'll just move on to whoever is next after Ukraine.) Since you brought up WWII, remind me, how did capitulating to Hitler in 1938 work out in the long run?
> I'm not sure where you got the 'chicken' business from
Implying that people are cowardly for not pursuing aggression is like high schoolers calling each other 'chicken' for not doing something.
> folks who want everyone to bend the knee to Putin are usually acting out of malice, not fear.
I don't necessarily agree - people do feel fear. Regardless, who wants capitulation? Could you point out some leader? Or even a comment on this long page?
Not agreeing with aggression != supporting capitulation. There are infinitely more solutions. The question is, what outcome do you want and what acts are most likely to get you there? Aggression is emotionally satisfying, in the short term, but usually results in bad outcomes.
> Is it really warmongering to suggest a country should police it's own territory, or defend it's own interests from aggression aimed at them?
If the proposed solution is warfare, then it's warmongering. The point is that are many other solutions. And self-righteousness is irrelevant - it doesn't make the outcome better or worse; it's therefore a dangerous distraction, likely to cause sub-optimal outcomes (usually bad ones). Using it as a reason to pursue warfare is a hallmark of warmongering.
> they're the warmongers
They are, in a sense, but that doesn't change what you do. Again, it's an argument from self-righteousness - 'they started it'. That doesn't matter; what matters is the outcome and warfare is one option that provides one range of outcomes (almost all horrible, almost universally different than what was expected when the decision was made - think of Ukraine, Iraq, etc. etc.).
Russia is not a warmonger, in an important sense: They deliberately use 'grey zone' tactics, actions short of being sufficient to provoke war. It's fundamental to their strategy and therefore essential to understand:
They intend to cause political change, not warfare. You can see their effectiveness in the emotional responses on this page. They disregard outcomes - you can bet that while some have temporary emotional satisfaction, the outcomes will be Russia's.
This is...not true. Attacking key infrastructure is an act of war. Just because they try to do it secretly doesn't change that fact. 'Grey zone' tactics doesn't make any difference here. Green men, intel services, etc. are still government entities acting at the behest of the leadership to commit acts of war.
The argument here is about appeasement or not. If you allow continued acts of war to pass without response, you get more of them. This is the lesson of bullies from the playground to WW2. I'm more than willing to have a conversation about what sort of response is the best, but saying that Russia is not a warmonger is incorrect - they are committing acts of war. Just because no one has called them on it yet doesn't make it not warmongering.
You can say what you like, but nobody with expertise or authority agrees either that it's strategic infrastructure (if that's what you mean) or that it's anything like an act of war or casus belli.
I'm willing to bet that nobody has ever started a war over a cut cable.
Man, you have a love of arguments to authority. Just saying that everyone else thinks something isn't an argument and condescending to everyone isn't compelling, especially when you are incorrect.
Two seconds. That's how long that took. It _is_ strategic infrastructure and is declared so by everyone with expertise and authority. Since there are plenty of examples of wars caused by damaging / interrupting infrastructure - see any sort of blockade, you would lose that bet.
You have a reasonable argument on the basis of proportional response. I don't buy it, but it is a think that people can have a reasonable discussion about. If you engage in that discussion in good faith and stop condescending to everyone, you might have a better time and actually learn something.
Your attacks on me are just a poor substitution for having much to say, and violate HN guidelines. It's hard to imagine why you think it's appropriate, or why you can't discuss things without ad hominim attacks.
I'm not sure how they define 'critical'. My cell phone is 'digital communications' and yet the Russians could take it out without causing a war. Hacker News could be taken down without risking a war. Look at all the hacking attacks by nation states, for example, which have been far more damaging and threatening than the submarine cable damage.
I do understand the word 'strategic', that is, 'it significantly affects the security of the country'. Seizing Crimea is strategic; some nuclear weapons are strategic; cutting one cable is not strategic - the people and land of Finland are just as safe.
> Since there are plenty of examples of wars caused by damaging / interrupting infrastructure - see any sort of blockade, you would lose that bet.
My bet was, not from cutting a cable. It's just not that important.
> arguments to authority
I rely on people who know what they are talking about.
What do you think about the actual point, about how grey zone tactics work? If you don't understand them, Russia's tactics will own you (which they seem to).
> Russia is not a warmonger, in an important sense: They deliberately use 'grey zone' tactics, actions short of being sufficient to provoke war. It's fundamental to their strategy and therefore essential to understand
Using emotion to ignore and dismiss ideas is a tactic, but if we prioritize emotions over outcomes we get (temporarily) satisfied emotions and bad outcomes.
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