If the people in the CIA who do hiring want the talent who are excellent at lying and compartmentalizing their ethics, then that’s what the organization becomes over a generation.

Citation needed.

The CIA receives lots of opaque funding from the US government (at least opaque to citizens trying to FOIA), but just because it’s not easily accounted for doesn’t mean the org funds itself.

He is accused of fabricating his educational credentials.

Either this guy is fantastic at lying or the orgs where he worked are falling flat on due diligence.

LA had a construction company tap into a crude oil pipeline this weekend causing a leak into the LA River.

https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/east-los-angeles-rup...

San Bruno had a buried gas main explode in 2010 in a residential neighborhood (which was a few blocks from a family member of mine).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

Once a pipeline path is built, it’s inevitable tech debt that requires regular upkeep. You now have to trust PG&E (or whatever faceless expense-minimizing company) with regular maintenance of that pipeline.

Many railroads are interconnected, so the higher risk payloads can be routed further from residential areas when possible.

Ultimately risks can’t be completely avoided. The risks should be transparent to homeowners / renters. The city / county emergency crews are supposed to already have this info, so we know it’s available to some people but apparently not to every person whose life is impacted by these risks.

Governments need it to be solved by a team (either within the government or a vendor company) because it is the non-tech things that are missing from the open source solution: high availability / redundancy, hosting, backups, business continuity, audits, someone to grill when there is a leak.

The people who work in government and banks aren’t incompetent. They are just like you and I but they work within a highly rigid system because if their system isn’t rigid, societies fall. People don’t think rationally during bank runs or when nobody in a country can access public services for weeks at a time. This is the core hazard of Mr. Robot.

So we are back to a single “something you know” factor as identity?

There’s a reason your idea doesn’t exist.

But also, the chemical is actively undergoing an exothermic reaction (which is why the tank is at risk for failure). How do you transport such a toxic fluid without putting much more of the public at risk?

It’s notoriously difficult to build here BECAUSE of NIMBYs, house values preservation, “preservation of character”, CEQA (a state law that gives LOTS of different people who shouldn’t have this power an effective veto for any new construction).

The nearest houses were built in 1958 according to Zillow.

In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them.

Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.

There is discussion that if Taiwan gets a similar deal to Ukraine for StarLink access, it makes the porcupine strategy much more viable.

Conversely, any country which can’t get access to it loses a massive tool in the tool chest.

And sadly, it means that if the US continues to be fickle with allies, those allies may not be able to rely on such a valuable tool.

Granted, Russia is trying hard to make every mistake in the book, but StarLink’s benefits for UA and cutting off RU units from StarLink was very advantageous this year.

Iran never attempted to develop a nuclear weapon. Literally 30 years of Netanyahu threatening it is just “weeks away” and Trump was the only US president to get suckered into that argument.

They have always used the threat of developing it as power, both domestically and regionally. It was 100% the exact same thing with Sadaam Hussein and WMD — they want to appear to have the strong weapon, but simultaneously don’t want to develop it or use it (until, ironically, Trump / Israel took out their leadership). Also, we were assured their entire nuclear program was “obliterated” summer 2025, so which is it? It can’t simultaneously be non-existent and an urgent national security threat to the US.

Now that Trump started the war in Iran, we are playing chicken with people who don’t care if they die or not (or so we are told). Not exactly a good position to be in against the “world’s largest sponsor of state terror”. We kicked a hornet’s nest and our political leadership didn’t stop to ask the experts (military, political, or economic) what were the completely predictable second and third order problems with this strategy. We couldn’t even get Trump to wait long enough to fill up the US SPR before starting a massive war in the Middle East.

To reiterate, we haven’t felt any of the actual pain YET. My arguments thus far are only of current harm, not the likely harm in the near future. That’s for next month’s comments.

After OpenAI went for-profit and China became a significant AI powerhouse, he no longer cares about safety and just insists that his team get “there “ (whatever the destination is) before “they” do. I’m not so certain he has a coherent belief system, but is probably further into AI psychosis or paranoid delusions than we want to believe.

Terrible options for a person with some of the most wealth in the tech world and perhaps just as influential, given that he effectively ensured Trump won in 2024, had direct foreign policy comms with Putin post-2022, controls the only cost-effective gateway to space, was given the keys to destroy his own regulators, is impregnating dozens of women (but perhaps not paying for those kids), etc.