Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.

Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.

Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/creating-a-safer-...

As I recall, they recommended putting the expected values on a floppy disk and setting the ‘write protect’ tab, so the checksums couldn’t be changed.

The cheapest USB KVM-over-IP costs about €50 - that's 8 months of colo fees gone.

Colo 'remote hands' in western countries can cost €120/hour, once all expenses and overheads are taken into account. Admittedly, that's for someone to drop what they're doing and rush to your sever. But getting that laptop unpacked, checked over, labelled, installed in a rack, associated to a customer account, powered up and working is going to cost 3 months of fees at least.

One laptop gets lost or damaged during shipping, or shows up mysteriously broken when the customer claims it worked when they sent it? That's a €200 device gone, 28 months of colo fees. You can argue your way out of it, but the guy doing the arguing is the €120/hour remote hands guy.

It'd be easy to lose money on this.

Do buyers need a motorised hood ornament? A tiny vase built into the dashboard? A built-in champagne chiller? Gull wing doors? A spoiler and a 300-horsepower engine?

If it boosts sales by giving the vehicle a distinctive character, though, there's a place in the market for that tiny vase.

Polymarket has $5 million of wagers on "Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by end of April?"

The toll Iran charges for safe passage is $2 million per ship, and at current prices such a ship would be carrying about $200 million of oil. Oh, and we live in a world where a single billionaire will happily spend $200 million to influence politics.

The polymarket number merely shows that nobody's paid to make it higher or lower yet.

So I can see why offering trusted signing for individuals worldwide would come with certain challenges.

Isn't that true of almost every restraint on the state's power?

A lot of less intelligent people get very emotional about the state quartering soldiers in homes against the wishes of the homeowner. But if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. We may not know who the Zodiac Killer is but I can tell you one thing for sure - he didn't have four to ten infantrymen in his house, keeping track of his comings and goings. Given the obvious security benefits of having soldiers in your home, no rational person would object - unless they've got a meth lab in their basement. /s

When they try to open a browser, they also print the URL to the console. Open that in your browser and go through an authentication flow; it'll end forwarding you to a localhost URL like http://127.0.0.1:8080/authorization-code/callback?code=XXXX&... which will fail.

Copy that callback URL, connect to your VM/docker container, and curl it.

The curl stage requires the agent make a call to auth.whatever-vendor.com so if it fails at this stage, check your VM/container network settings. And make sure you quoted the curl right so the & wasn't misinterpreted.

It'll then save a file at ~/.codex/auth.json or ~/.claude.json or similar, so you won't need to log in again. The secret in this file will periodically rotate, so you need to mount it read-write not read-only.

Apparently doing emergency repair work can be extremely well paid.

(His wife was fine with it, but when there's great inconvenience for the family balanced by great pay for the family, you've got to get paid)

You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.

What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.

In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.

So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.

Then exactly the same government also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.

Untraceable-but-single-use proof-of-age tokens? Good for privacy, but now that 14-year-old can get tokens from an 18-year-old friend for cash.

Proof tokens that only last a few minutes, or a three-way handshake between user, government and website? Harder to trade, but now the government's got a good guess about who's opening pornhub.

Requiring sites to keep audit records, to prove they really did the verification procedure? Wildly insecure, we don't want them storing passport photos. Requiring them to not keep audit records? Then they can skip or half-ass the checks.

Camera-based age estimation? Once again the 14-year-old can have an 18-year-old pass the check for them. Or a video game character creator or something. Scanning a government ID card? Better hope Dad never leaves his wallet unattended for 5 minutes. And not everyone has a passport or driver's license.

Age attestation from an electronic driver's license, plus face id biometric validation, with a secure element, trusted execution environment and code attestation? Congrats, now you've handed your national ID database to the world's largest adtech/tracking company. Hope you weren't trying to distance your nation from US tech dominance.

In my experience, when a country like Britain passes a censorship law, people in other countries like America don't enjoy being given the tools to comply with it, even if the tools are entirely optional.

When there'd be UN resolutions before the armed intervention, a casus belli with (non-fake) evidence of genocide, a peacekeeping force with troops from 39 countries, and captured leaders tried. And the peacekeeping force was able to deliver peace reasonably effectively, instead of bleeding troops and money for decades on end.

And although to some it seemed like an American president trying to distract domestic political attention from his sexual misdeeds, it was just a consensual blowjob from an adult woman.

Peace had just come to Northern Ireland, western relations were improving with Russia (newly democratic) and China (sure to soon adopt democracy as they open up to the world). The first parts of the International Space Station had just been launched. School shootings weren't a thing, the one a year later would be shocking and the cause of major soul-searching. Also Half-Life was game of the year.

For example, imagine there's some German-owned gold in a UK bank vault, the owners sell it to a UK broker who sells it to a Chinese investor? The physical bars don't move, but on paper it's been imported to the UK then exported.

But a lot of people looking at export figures are expecting to learn things about the manufacturing industry, and picturing exports as washing machines, cars and computer chips - which imply lots of well paid jobs for skilled labour. So the UK reports import/export figures with 'non-monetary gold' listed separately.

(The fact flows of gold are highly volatile allows a classic bit of political sleight-of-hand - if you include gold, UK exports are both up and down since Brexit, depending on the pair of dates you choose)

For 99% of smartphone users, you can't get apps onto their phones without Apple and Google signing the app and letting you into their store, and users can't install the app without an Apple/Google account.

Why remove a dependency on Google, when you'll still be 100% dependent on Google?

Anybody working on "Digital ID" has already made peace with the fact that it can be turned off overnight if Trump says so.

All they need to do is check if you're cashing out more chips than you came in with.