wildmusings
Joined 13 years ago
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Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
This is nothing new in kind. The founders were fearful of mass democracy too and sought to avoid creating one. For better or for worse, they failed.
Comment · 6 years ago
People died alone and couldn’t have funerals because epidemiologists said it was too dangerous. A week later, those same epidemiologists were cheering on mass demonstrations.
It’s pretty clear that these “experts” are abusing their status as supposedly objective scientists to advance a political movement. Why should anyone trust anything they say?
Comment · 6 years ago
The "experts" have destroyed their own credibility. Do you remember the mass protests in every major and minor city a few weeks ago, where the "experts" responded by encouraging the protests, because "racism is a deadly pandemic too" or some equivocating nonsense like that? Doctors and nurses were participating in these mass protests. People were packed shoulder to shoulder for multiple city blocks. This was right after all of the "experts" forcefully condemned tiny anti-lockdown protests. Even the NYT was forced to confront the stunning hypocrisy https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona... . The vast majority of news outlets are still pretending that the protests had nothing to do with the spike in cases.
It also damages their credibility when they cross the line from "here are the epidemiological facts" to "here are the appropriate tradeoffs between economic stability and acute illness prevention". The latter is not a question that an epidemiologist is any more qualified to speak to than anyone else. Those are political decisions.
They do the same for global warming. The nature and extent of anthropogenic climate change is a question for scientists. But they have all also latched onto the conclusion that global wealth redistribution is the only solution. Again, they are laundering their scientific expertise into political authority. I more or less think that the scientific process moves us to toward better understanding, but the collective political opinions of scientists should not be mistaken for science.
When the experts are abusing their status to pursue political ends, then it's no surprise that the people they seek to politically vanquish put up a resistance by attacking that expertise.
Comment · 6 years ago
A quarter today is worth less than a penny in 1900. Maybe this is a good time to get rid of all coins except maybe the quarter. It is frankly ridiculous to be dealing with pennies, nickels, and dimes, worthless coins.
Comment · 6 years ago
If that’s true, it’s wrong. And was it a policy or a few losers trying to pad their numbers? I’ll withhold judgment at least until the official army response.
Comment · 6 years ago
It is right and just for a nation to encourage its young to defend their mothers and fathers, and children and grandchildren not yet born. Any nation that sees this as wrong has lost its will to exist and is living on borrowed time.
I’m not sure the author knows this. He points out that this is useful for post-exploitation data gathering. That is, you’ve already compromised a machine/account and are looking to gather as much potentially useful information as possible. But he puts “securely” in scare quotes, which is not honest because this is secure storage: if you’re not authenticated, the key can’t be read. The encryption key is derived from the user password, so it can’t be defeated by offline reading either.