mechoman444

This article is extremely short, misleading, and ultimately pointless.

The owner of the coffee machine was unable to determine why it had generated approximately 1 TB of network traffic in just 10 days. However, the data reportedly remained within his own Wi-Fi network and was never transmitted over the internet. The owner himself acknowledged that it was likely some kind of error, software malfunction, or defective unit.

More importantly, he admitted that he never investigated the issue further. Instead, he simply unplugged the machine and replaced it rather than attempting to determine what was actually happening.

So what, exactly, does this article accomplish? It provides no technical explanation, identifies no underlying cause, and offers no evidence that the manufacturer was collecting, transmitting, or doing anything nefarious with the data. It presents an unexplained technical anomaly and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

The implication is obvious: look at how much data this coffee machine is generating! What could the manufacturer possibly be doing with all that information? The article encourages suspicion without providing the evidence necessary to justify it.

And the irony is that the sheer volume of traffic makes the most sensational interpretation less plausible, not more. One terabyte of data in 10 days is an extraordinary amount for a coffee machine. Without knowing what the traffic consisted of, the most reasonable starting point is a software bug, a malfunctioning device, or some other technical error, not a manufacturer secretly harvesting an unprecedented amount of information about someone’s coffee-drinking habits.

Could there be a legitimate privacy concern? Certainly. But establishing one requires examining the traffic, identifying its destination, determining what information was being exchanged, and explaining why. None of that appears to have happened here.

Instead, we are left with an unexplained anomaly, an owner who chose not to investigate it, and an article that invites readers to fill in the blanks with their own conspiracy theories.

If the goal was to inform readers about the privacy risks of connected appliances, the author had an opportunity to do so. Instead, the article generates suspicion without generating any meaningful understanding.

That is the real problem with this kind of reporting: it teaches people to be afraid of technology without teaching them how to evaluate the evidence. There is a legitimate conversation to be had about connected devices, data collection, and consumer privacy. Stories like this do little to advance it.

It wouldn’t matter if she was buck naked in the middle of Octoberfest no one has the right to touch anyone without their consent.

You know why right?

You know why he still has the big signs up and why he’s still considers himself to be a supporter of trump and his ilk?

Because politics in America are treated like team sports… Got to stick by your team in the good years and the bad unfortunately it’s just not how politics work you can’t just trade a bad politician for a better one from another state.

One of the fundamental issues I have with private corporations is how they seem to think raising prices is going to work indefinitely.

Prices should fluctuate with the market, but they never seem to come back down, at least not significantly. You cannot simply keep raising prices forever to avoid taking a loss, because eventually you are going to incur losses anyway. Nobody is going to buy your product if it becomes too expensive.

Diesel being $6.30 a gallon in America is ostentatious. It may not be completely unreasonable given the circumstances, but that doesn’t make it any less absurd.

And when it comes to petroleum, it doesn’t actually matter that much whether a particular company makes money every single quarter. Somebody is going to step in and sell it at whatever price the market will support, as long as there is demand.

I think we have been conned, as a society, into believing that corporations simply cannot incur losses or they will immediately go out of business. Historically, that has never really been the case. Essential businesses and gargantuan corporations are consistently propped up by governments, investors, and financial institutions because, in many cases, we simply cannot allow them to fail.

We cannot currently function as a modern society without diesel.

So when a company says, essentially, “We have to raise prices because otherwise we’ll lose money,” my response is: Okay. Then lose some money.

Businesses are allowed to have bad years. They are allowed to make less profit. They are even allowed to lose money. The idea that every company must continually increase prices, maintain or increase profit margins, and never meaningfully absorb a loss is not some immutable law of economics. It is a business model.

Okay, just a couple of details here I’d like to put out in the open.

First and foremost, I don’t like billionaires. I think they should all have their wealth stripped down until they’re under a billion dollars. There is no reason why billionaires should exist. That’s such an incredibly large number that our human brains don’t even really understand the difference between a million, 100 million, and a billion. It’s visually difficult to even represent. So as far as I’m concerned, the sooner these guys can get their wealth back down to a more reasonable level, the better it is for the world in general.

Second, I really like Proposition 40. It’s got some real teeth to it. The proposition doesn’t simply charge taxes on revenue that a billionaire produces; it charges the tax against their net worth, which I think is absolutely fantastic because it actually targets accumulated wealth.

And that’s important because billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting around in a checking account. They may have significantly less than even a billion dollars in liquid cash. If Mr. Sergey Brin is worth $250 billion, for example, a 5% wealth tax would represent roughly $12.5 billion. He’s going to have to come up with that money somehow. He can cash out assets, borrow against them, sell investments, or use other sources of liquidity. The proposition also provides for payment over a period of up to five years, although doing so comes with additional charges.

That’s going to be a real interruption for billionaires, and I absolutely love that aspect of it. These people have accumulated enormous amounts of wealth while the rest of us live in an economy where ordinary people are taxed on their income, their purchases, their property, and virtually everything else they do.

For decades, America’s tax system has allowed enormous fortunes to accumulate largely through appreciating assets rather than ordinary taxable income. Billionaires can therefore become dramatically wealthier without necessarily realizing that wealth as conventional income.

Good on California for proposing a tax on extreme wealth that actually has the potential to put a dent in those fortunes.

Mind you, these billionaires are ultimately trying to avoid what amounts to superficial damage to their coffers. Five percent of a $250 billion fortune is still an enormous amount of money, but it leaves $237.5 billion behind. And if their assets continue appreciating, they can potentially recover that lost wealth relatively quickly.

I’m not saying 5% is going to destroy these people. It won’t. But that’s exactly why I think it’s a good step. It’s a real tax on accumulated wealth, it actually requires the ultra-wealthy to part with a meaningful amount of money, and it demonstrates that enormous fortunes aren’t necessarily untouchable simply because the wealth isn’t sitting in a bank account.

Yes which is why I almost immediately deleted my comment.

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I was in behavioral therapy for over a decade a lot of it was about how to handle finances and the way of economics now and how they impact mental health. It was a common subject and group as well.

Don’t make it out to be like there’s some kind of conspiracy that mental health professionals on a lot talk about finances.

Well sir… This is definitely a much more succinct way of saying everything that I said. ☹️

My experience with the federal court system and the Bureau of Prisons has given me a perspective that is very different from someone who has only observed the system from the outside.

I can tell you from personal experience that the BOP, the federal courts, and the various law-enforcement agencies operating within the federal justice system do not operate according to some simple racial hierarchy. In my experience, your skin color is not what determines how the federal system treats you. I would go even further and argue that “white privilege,” as it is commonly used today, is an oversimplified framework for understanding what actually happens inside the federal justice system.

What we absolutely do have and what I believe is considerably more consequential is wealth privilege.

The more money you have, the more resources you can put behind your defense. You can hire better attorneys, retain experts, investigate your case more thoroughly, challenge evidence, negotiate more effectively, and generally make the government work harder to obtain a conviction. In some circumstances, having sufficient money and resources can mean avoiding prison entirely. Someone without those resources simply does not have the same ability to fight the government.

That disparity is very real, and I saw it firsthand.

Where I disagree strongly is with the idea that the federal justice system is primarily organized around race. The system is enormous, bureaucratic, imperfect, and frequently driven by institutional incentives. America has also built an enormous incarceration infrastructure around the idea that imprisonment is the default response to a wide range of offenses. Once you have that much infrastructure, that many institutions, that many employees, and that much money tied to incarceration, there are inevitably powerful incentives to keep the machinery operating.

I am not claiming that every person in the system is corrupt or that every case is unjust. Quite the opposite. My experience showed me that the system is generally functional, but it is also an enormous machine with thousands of moving parts and institutional incentives that have little to do with the simplistic racial narratives people often use to explain it.

If you want to understand where privilege actually matters in the federal justice system, I would start with money.

The person who can afford an exceptional defense has a fundamentally different set of options from the person who cannot. That difference can affect everything from pretrial litigation to sentencing to the amount of time someone ultimately spends incarcerated.

In my experience, the most consequential privilege in the federal justice system isn’t the color of your skin. It’s the depth of your wallet.

Let me ask you this: you’re a 10- to 18-year-old kid, maybe younger. You live with your parents, you have some kind of game console, or perhaps a computer your parents bought for you or use themselves. One day, you tell your parents, “I want to play Grand Theft Auto.”

Your parents essentially have to purchase the game for you, because a retailer isn’t going to sell a mature-rated game directly to a child. If you’re buying it digitally through Steam or another online store, you generally need a payment method, which again means your parents are involved in the transaction.

So what exactly is age verification at the game or operating-system level supposed to accomplish?

The purchasing process is already, by its nature, an age-gated process. If a parent is willing to purchase a mature-rated game for their child and allow that child to play it, then the parent has already made that decision. If the parent is irresponsible enough to allow their child to play violent or otherwise age-restricted games without supervision, that is a separate parenting issue. I don’t see how forcing developers, publishers, distributors, or operating-system manufacturers to verify the child’s age meaningfully addresses that problem.

That’s what I don’t understand about these laws: what is the actual benefit?

From a political perspective, I don’t see an obvious constituency demanding this. I don’t see how it provides a significant benefit to corporations, either. It doesn’t seem particularly popular or politically consequential because the issue is so niche. So what is actually driving this?

I’m not saying there has to be some grand conspiracy behind it. But if there is a rational explanation for why governments keep pursuing increasingly complicated age-verification requirements, I’d genuinely like to understand what it is. Is this primarily about liability? Political signaling? Pressure from advocacy groups? Regulatory precedent? Or is the government simply trying to establish a broader principle that online services should be responsible for determining the age of their users?

Then there’s the technological problem.

The infrastructure simply isn’t designed around reliable age verification. Take operating systems as an example. A law can require an operating system to verify the age of its users, but that doesn’t mean the operating system actually has reliable access to that information. Windows and macOS may be able to integrate age verification through accounts or other identity systems, but what happens on Linux? What mechanism is the operating system supposed to use to determine whether the person sitting at the keyboard is 12, 22, or 52?

And even if you solve that problem, you haven’t necessarily solved the underlying problem. A child can use a parent’s account, a shared computer, a friend’s device, or any number of other arrangements. You can build increasingly elaborate verification systems, but ultimately you still run into the fact that parents control the devices, accounts, and purchases in the home.

So I keep coming back to the same question: what problem is this actually solving that existing parental control systems and the purchasing process don’t already address?

I’m not opposed to reasonable protections for children online. I’m questioning whether mandatory age verification actually provides enough additional protection to justify the enormous technological and regulatory infrastructure required to implement it.

Because if the practical result is simply that the government requires companies to verify something that parents are already responsible for controlling, then I’m having a difficult time seeing what meaningful benefit we’re getting in exchange for all of this additional regulation.

By crypto he meant doge.

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EXACTLY!

All those things that the meme mentions are something that the government should be looking into regardless of what economy they institute!

I’m paying $2,000 a month for a three bedroom that shouldn’t cost anywhere above $1100 a month!

I went to home Depot last night bought some cockroach traps, Teflon tape a plunger and a short length of stainless steel tubing for $30. What’s up on tables 98 cents the plunger was $4 the box of cockroach traps was eight bucks and the length of tubing was $15! And none of the prices make any sense!

Of course because this is the pressing issue of the new millennium. Everyone sitting around going man Nixon really got the short end of the stick.

And Meta can pay billions, continue doing business as usual, recoup the cost relatively quickly, and eventually become immensely profitable again.

At a certain scale, what you and I consider to be an enormous amount of money can become almost meaningless to a company like that. A multibillion-dollar fine may sound devastating to the average person, but if it represents only a small fraction of the company’s revenue or profits, it is little more than a cost of doing business.

If you actually want to hurt these companies and create a meaningful deterrent, the penalty has to be tied to their economic scale. Take a percentage of their profits or, in sufficiently serious cases, their revenue. Make the penalty large enough that the company genuinely feels the financial consequences of its behavior.

Otherwise, you aren’t really punishing them. You’re just irritating them.

Says the guy making unsubstantiated declarative statements whilst drawing erroneous conclusions from actual facts.

Oh shoot here let me quote that for you.

erroneous conclusions from actual facts.

Once again, our judicial system is a gargantuan, messy machine with thousands of moving parts and millions of people trying to interpret and apply millions of laws across millions of cases, each with its own circumstances.

I am not equating my personal experience with the BOP and federal court system to evidence that our justice system is perfect or inherently fair. I have explicitly acknowledged that wrongful prosecutions happen, innocent people go to prison, and judges, prosecutors, police officers, and other officials make serious mistakes. My point has always been narrower: the justice system is, for the most part, functional at determining guilt and administering punishment for crimes.

The reason I brought up my own experience is simple: it is the experience I actually have. The prison system is an entirely different world and culture a society within society. And once you’re inside, being white isn’t necessarily some automatic advantage.

I was sentenced under the law and served my time because I committed a crime. The idea that I somehow received a special benefit simply because I am white doesn’t comport with my actual experience. I went to prison because I broke the law, and I was punished for it.

The cognitive dissonance here is remarkable. It is one thing to look at the system from the outside and form conclusions about it; it is another to actually live through it. I can tell you that, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of the people I did time with had committed serious crimes and deserved to be incarcerated. That doesn’t mean the system is incapable of injustice, nor does it excuse the horrific things I witnessed while I was in the BOP. I saw things nobody should have to see and met people nobody should have to meet.

And yet, after experiencing all of that firsthand, I still came out believing that our judicial system is, for the most part, functional.

That’s the point I don’t think people are understanding. I served time in prison for a crime I committed, experienced the system from the inside, and I’m still capable of assessing it objectively rather than simply condemning it because I had a terrible experience.

Right. So still nothing.