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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I believe that’s not the law though. The law outlines the conditions under which a person has an “expectation of privacy.” If you’re inside your house, you have an expectation of privacy and so should not be filmed. If you’re on the sidewalk in public, you have no expectation of privacy. If you’re in a private establishment (restaurant or store for instance), the owner or their representatives can ask you not to record and you have to comply.

    All of street photography depends on this kind of legal framework.



  • I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

    First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

    The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

    The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.



  • I’m going to hazard a guess it’s a combination of falling budget and an over reliance on autocorrect. If it’s like other industries, they’re trying to get more articles out with fewer people.

    I know that I often have an atrocious number of typos - but some are entirely the fault of autocorrect either changing a correct word to something else or correcting a typo to a word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. I’m hoping that the next generation will improve this.

    If anything a now - not typo at least indicates that it was written by a human. LLM errors generally don’t involve that sort of thing.





  • I’m just spitballing here, but I’ve done this kind of thing.

    1. Establish a program where any defecting Russian soldier will receive a bonus of $20k USD and a work visa in one of a list of countries.
    2. Defecting with military equipment increases the bonus based on the combat and the intelligence value of the equipment. 30-some years ago, I believe we were offering $1M to anyone defecting with one of the new MIGs. I think we got a couple out of that program.
    3. Defection bonus can also scale with rank and intelligence value of the soldier. Defecting general? $1M. Defecting colonel? $250k. More money for info, and you can land a job as a “consultant” with western intelligence. Maybe throw in a condo.
    4. The Russians are quite famous for punishing or executing innocent family members in revenge for such actions. They will have difficulty doing so if the number of defectors are in the thousands to tens of thousands, but the initial people will likely be those who have less of a concern there.
    5. Expend funding for in-country intelligence assets to construct an Underground Railroad for defectors. Assign an initial $5B USD to develop networks in major cities to smuggle the families of defectors out of the country with arrangements made for visas etc.

    If you were to sit down with a spreadsheet right now, you could come up with a rough estimate for the cost of eliminating one Russian asset - soldier, tank, air defense system, whatever. A program like the above would reassign those costs, with the additional benefit of saving the lives of Ukrainian troops and civilians (because it’s non-combat attrition) and having a potentially cascading effect (the more people that quit, the more others are likely to quit since it reduces both manpower and morale).

    I don’t think it’s a big deal yet (although morale is a big deal), but it possibly could be.