> Lindsey Graham has been pretty mask-off in wanting to take control of Iran's oil resources and, in his words, "make a ton of money."
Which kind of set all of this off back in the day: UK/US oil companies controlled Iranian oil, the legislature nationalized it, the Shah suppressed the legislature and portions of the population:
So lunar tidal forces are slowing the rotation, but (recently?) Earth mantle/core is causing a speed up, but climate change and melting ice is contributing to the slow down side:
The general trend is slowing down. Apparently (?) once the day gets to be 24h+0.001sec (+1 millisecond), a leap second would occur about every 1000 days; then when it becomes 24h+0.002sec, a leap second would occur about every 500 days; when it reaches 24h+0.003sec, a leap second would occur about every year; etc.
I think this Fortune story has a decent timeline of events and explains the perspective of both sides:
> At first, Underwood recalls, he was confused and hurt. “We were trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,” he tells me when I visit his offices in Camarillo, Calif., in December. “Because we were really vulnerable, both in the percentage of our business that he commanded—and I guess our belief that we were going to have a long-term relationship.” But he soon became convinced, Underwood tells me, that Tran’s intentions were bad, and had been for some time. “Basically, he really was out to destroy me,” he says. “He didn’t give a damn about me or our family or all that we’d done together.”
> Over at Huy Fong, feelings were similarly raw. Tran felt betrayed, and blindsided by accusations that he had been underhanded. For most of three decades, he had remained loyal to Underwood as his only pepper producer, and each year he had handed over millions on the promise of a harvest, a gesture that he saw as an act of faith. Now all that trust had collapsed in a petty argument over money.
> Tran has come to believe that Underwood was trying to drive him to bankruptcy, then steal his sauce business. “I helped him because he grew chili for me,” he says. “He made money, he owned land. But it is not enough. He wanted to take over my business.” It felt like being “stabbed in the back,” adds Donna Lam, Tran’s sister-in-law and executive operations officer.
That story actually pretty bad.. Court findings are pretty clear on this [0]:
> When Roberts arrived, Tran told him that he was forming a new company. Lam was going to operate the company. Tran told Roberts that Roberts would be working for the new company.
> When Roberts declined the job offer, Tran was not happy. Tran told Roberts that Underwood would have to deliver peppers for $500 per ton to compete with Chinese pepper mash that sold for $300 per ton. [...] Underwood was suddenly facing imminent catastrophic financial consequences. It could not grow peppers for $500 a ton. Its costs averaged $610 a ton. [...] Tran refused to provide Underwood with prepayments needed to finance the crop. Tran also insisted that Underwood contract with Chilico rather than Huy Fong.
OK, 8 days after agreeing on contract (!), the Huy Fong man tried to hire away Underwood's COO (Roberts), pushes hard for price below cost, refuses to provide money for planting, and tries to offload responsibility to a shell company. This sounds about as evil as it gets, and Underwood was right to refuse.
And what does the journalist say about this? "He wanted to take over my business"? "It felt like being "stabbed in the back""? I am sorry, I think that story author was fed some BS by Tran, and did not bother to verify it.
(Alternatively, maybe Tran has a explanation that makes sense for him... I'd like to hear the thoughts of someone who walks back on contract few days after it's made, and how they justify it to themselves - but sadly that fortune story does not have this)
> The irony is how quickly we had shifted from AI will help in curing cancer and other diseases to using AI to destroy and kill our enemies.
"We" have been mainstream (?) talking about AI killing since (at least) the first Terminator movie in 1984. The geeks/nerds have much earlier: Frank Herbert talked about humans outsourcing their thinking and being 'enslaved' in Dune with the Butlerian Jihad in 1965. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are from 1942.
This viewpoint isn't a slippery slope, it's a runaway train.
"You moved into a neighborhood with lead pipes? That's on you, should have done more research"
"Your vitamins contained undisclosed allergens? You're an adult, and it didn't say it DIDN'T contain those"
"Passwords stolen because your provider stored them in plaintext? They never claimed to store them securely, so it's really on you"
Legislating that everyone must always be safe regardless of what app they use is a one-way ticket to walled gardens for everything. This kind of safety is the rationale behind things like secure boot, Apple's App Store, and remote attestation.
Also consider what this means for open source. No hobbyist can ship an IM app if they don't go all the way and E2E encrypt (and security audit) the damn thing. The barriers of entry this creates are huge and very beneficial for the already powerful since they can afford to deal with this stuff from day one.
Doesn't have to be a law. Can just be standard engineering practice.
Websockets for example are always encrypted (not e2e). That means anyone who implements a chess game over websockets gets encryption at no extra effort.
We just need e2e to be just as easy. For example maybe imagine a new type of unicode which is encrypted. Your application just deals with 'unicode' strings and the OS handles encryption and decryption for you, including if you send those strings over the network to others.
I once publicly stated it's understandable that someone would post an ad that says "No YouTubers" because people don't want to be content for others. The reply I got was "but you're being recorded all the time anyway", as if those are remotely related.
this isn't anything new, however. No messaging has been actually private since forever, that's why encryption was invented. To keep secrets and to pass those secrets in a way that can be observed without revealing the secret.
Telephones can be tapped, people sold special boxes that would encrypt/decrypt that audio before passing it to the phone or to the ear. Mail can be opened, covertly or not. AIM was in the clear (I think at one point, fully in the clear, later probably in the clear as far as the aol servers were concerned)...
Unless the app/method is directly lying to users about being e2ee it's not a slippery slope, it's the status quo. Now there are some apps out there that I think i've seen that are lying. They are claiming they are 'encrypted' but fail to clarify that it's only private on the wire, like the aim story.. the message is encrypted while it flys to the 'switchboard' where it's plain text and then it's put wrapped in encryption on the wire to send it to the recipient.
The claim here that actually makes me chuckle is somehow trying to paint e2ee as 'unsafe' for users.
If you are a grown adult and don't do research on "<insert any topic that could have a material negative impact on your life, but that is not currently on your radar as being a topic that could have a material negative impact on your life>" then that's really on you.
It definitely ignores that many people don't have time. If someone is working over 40 hours per week, plus maybe doing unpaid labor taking care of kids or elders, where are people supposed to find the time and energy to brush up on a million different topics they don't even know they might not know enough about? Especially if they might also have medical issues, or hobbies, or want to have any time at all to relax.
Obviously, one way to improve the situation would be to make sure people are paid fairly and not overworked and have access to good and affordable or free childcare and elder-care and medical care, but corporations don't want that either. If anything, they're incentivised to disempower workers and keep them uninformed, and to get as much time out of them as they can for as little money as possible.
80% of the population does not and will never do that level of deep dive on apps
same discussion for any form of technology be it TVs or changing their car's oil
the deliberate app-store-ification of all things computer is also designed to keep people from asking those questions -- just download in and install, pleb.
it's why the Zoomers can't email attachments or change file types: all of the computers they grew up with were designed so they never had to understand what happens under the hood.
Most people couldn't tell you how their car works, at least not enough to fix it. Is that handholding, too?
People can't be knowledgable about everything. There's just too much information in the world, and too many different skills that could be learned, and not enough time.
A carpenter can rely on power tools without understanding fully how the tools work, and it's fine, as long as the tools are made to safe standards and the user understands basic safety instructions (e.g. wear protective eyewear).
To me, making sure that apps don't screw with people, even if they don't understand how the apps work, is roughly the equivalent of making sure power drills are made safely so they don't explode in peoples' hands.
“As long as the user understands basic safety instructions”
Yes, the internet has basic safety instructions, too (and probably just as many bother to read them), number one or two is “almost nothing online is ever really private”. I learned it by the mid 2000s, not knowing it in 2026 is not excusable with “people don’t need to know how everything works”.
And I never said that people should be knowledgeable about everything...
... and this is not what I was referring to either.
Less handholding -> more learning... but even then, what I meant is that you do not have to be knowledgeable to know that your "private messages" are not really encrypted and can be read by the admin (in case of forums, for one), and so forth.
You're saying the federal government granted blanket authorization to switch to the one? So the only reason states wait on authorization is merely obtusely insisting on the wrong choice? (In addition to being impotent.) The more I learn about this issue the more things I find to be angry about.
Indeed, it is my opinion. It's not in the minority so much as it runs counter to what lobbyists with vested interests have loudly promoted. Most people haven't given the matter much thought and don't have an opinion on it (let alone an informed one).
"Morons" was an overly dramatic way of putting it but it is very clearly the technically deficient choice as will be apparent to anyone who bothers to consult the history books. The US already attempted permanent DST in 1974 but quickly repealed it. Russia similarly tried it out from 2011 to 2014 before switching to permanent standard time instead. The UK also tried it at one point before abandoning it. Mexico might have tried it for the longest, from 1996 until 2022 when they too switched to permanent standard time. (Actually I'm unclear why Mexico gave it up. They're far enough south that the difference between the two shouldn't be particularly impactful.)
Yes. States are allowed to ignore "summer time" and remain on "standard time" all year round. Arizona is the usual example cited, they do not change the clocks, and remain on standard time year round.
The special auth. from the Fed's is needed to switch to "permanent summer time" (and, possibly advocating for year round "summer time" gives the state politicians cover to do nothing, because "their hands are tied...").
Which kind of set all of this off back in the day: UK/US oil companies controlled Iranian oil, the legislature nationalized it, the Shah suppressed the legislature and portions of the population:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27état
the population got tired of being pushed down, and so eventually fought back:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
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