Missile defense is one of those technologies that has the potential to dramatically destabilize certain aspects of warfare. Back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began his fixation on “Star Wars” ballistic missile defense, wiser heads pointed out that: a) it’s really hard b) if it did work, it would mean the US was setting itself up to “win” a nuclear war.
The best kind of ‘risk’ to take is the risk of no-risk. I.e.: a sure thing. when you’re talking about capitalism, that means “win/win” scenarios should look indistinguishable from when the game is rigged in someone’s favor. Otherwise, you haven’t rigged it hard enough.
This must be a horrible moment for a rabbit or a mouse or a chipmunk; when I think about the predator drone-strikes, I imagine they must instill the same immobilizing terror, except the drones don’t cast that flickering shadow.
Back in 2009 I did some strategy consulting for a company that was building a cop-cam system; they wanted to know if having the data in “the cloud” would be acceptable, and what protections would need to be in place for the customers to trust it. My job was to look for perverse incentives in the design, and to suggest ways to make the storage option more palatable.
It’s become a rite of the losers to decry the influence of money on politics, and it’s a legitimate complaint. As a portable form of power, money is going to immediately be corrupting to any system you can inject it into.
What do you call it when someone wants more money, even proportionally tiny amounts, yet is willing to go to great lengths to get them? I’m surprised psychologists haven’t come up with a term for it, though I suppose it could be a manifestation of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
There is topic I’ve wanted to explore but haven’t because I am not sure how to explain it or make sense of it, but thanks to the NYPD I think I’ve figured it out. The problem is “what does ‘helping’ someone mean?” at a strategic level.
“What happened to Abu Zubaydah’s eye?”
People who watch the surveillance state have known about this stuff since the early 1980s. My personal theory is that spooks talk to each other (as spooks do) and eventually word starts to leak; it’s too clever a scam to miss. Then, when a program becomes huge enough, there are tens of thousands of people using the data from it; it’s pretty easy to figure out where the data is coming from. I first encountered the international reach-around when I was at a conference and wound up talking to an interesting fellow who turned out to be a journalist that had been investigating the surveillance state for a very long time.
A friend of mine retired from an IT executive job and she and her husband decided to become wealthy capitalists in their retirement. Since the evils of capitalism are a frequent topic here on FtB, maybe it’s a good idea to do a quick explainer of how a few of those evils work. These are the simple ones, and I’ll describe them as cleanly as I can so you can understand what’s going on when you hear about it elsewhere.