Good point. I should have qualified what I said by saying that the Israeli operation may have the effects I listed. But, as you say, it might backfire and have the opposite of the intended effect. I guess that is always a risk with these types of operations.
It wasn’t “stupid”. As a psy-op, it further complicates Hezbollah’s communications, sows fear among Hezbollah members, demonstrates Israel’s far-reaching capabilities, makes civilians suspicious of Hezbollah officials, etc. If Israel does something similar a couple more times, Hezbollah will have to resort to bicycle couriers and smoke signals.
It also undermines Hezbollah’s credibility. The Lebanese people are not stupid. They know that Hezbollah is a shadow government allowing Iran to control Lebanon and use it as a staging ground for attacks on Israel. That leaves Lebanon in a permanent state of semi-war with Israel, not to mention its involvement in multiple other external conflicts. None of which is helpful for the health and prosperity of Lebanon.
Lebanon is a natural trading nation and always has been. It is a beautiful country full of kind people with excellent commercial instincts. They are held down as a nation by the fact that Hezbollah has turned the country into a pawn of the Ayatollah.
That is a good analogy. I think phones and tablets being app-centric has really handicapped Zoomers in some ways. As Gen X, the first thing we learned about computers was the file system. That gave us a map of the computer. It also made it clear that the operating system, the applications running on the operating, and the data you generated and stored on the operating system were all different things. With app-centric devices and cloud-storage, people aren’t exposed to that paradigm so much.
The new paradigm is more account-centric. You have a Microsoft account or a Google account or an Apple account and that’s the ecosystem you work within.
I had a girl drop out of my University class because she couldn’t figure out what a “file” was or how to “email” it to me. She just kept trying to share her Apple storage with me. Really sad. It’s hard to help someone who gets to university without even grasping the basic nature of a file system.
Oprah? Did AI get so advanced that it invented a time machine and sent us back to the 1980s? Next you’ll be telling me that Phil Donahue is back.
Interesting. I’ve got a fast internet connection and a server running 24/7 with Transmission and 9 TB of hard drive space. I run it behind Gluetun/NordVPN to avoid those copyright strikes. My setup has been extremely successful so far. I only delete torrents once they hit a ratio of 1.5 at the moment, though I could extend that if necessary. I don’t use cryptocurrency, though, and don’t intend to start. I assume my setup would be somewhat valuable to a private tracker. Do you have any recommendations?
Edit: oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I, too, only use bittorrent to share Linux ISOs and other non-copyright material. Definitely. Piracy is bad.
I thought I read that private trackers are hard to sign up to. Or that you have to prove yourself somehow and people get stressed about maintaining their ratio. Is that true? If so, that doesn’t sound fun.
I don’t live in America either, but I went on a cruise once and there were many Americans, including a black American couple who were very obviously urban. By which I mean, the wife wore high heels and a tight jeweled mini-skirt on a sea-kayaking excursion…clearly signalling that she hadn’t spent much time outside of a city.
Anyway, I was shocked when they spoke exactly like The Jeffersons, with all the exaggerated whooping, non-stop vernacular, and stage-like mannerisms. It was so over-the-top that I honestly thought they were play acting, but after chatting with them for a while I realized that was just how they were. They were very nice people and clearly having a great time.
Yes, the article makes the point that Signal needs to compete for talent with the rest of Silicon Valley. I get that. And we’ve all heard about the nearly unfathomable amounts of money that tech companies throw around. When you break it down to individual salaries, though, and see that even normal people in normal jobs are making a million dollars a year between salary and stock… well, I think it really exposes the spectacular wealth inequality that we have allowed to fester. I mean, sure, shelter costs may be high in Silicon Valley, but the cost of other goods remain about the same. A $50,000 truck that an average person in Nebraska might have to save for years to afford is barely a rounding error for folks making a million a year. I’m no economist, but it does seem like there are consequences for this kind of ever-growing wealth inequality.
It is also absurd on its face for a multi-millionaire developer to place a “Donate Now” button in an app and talk about being a non-profit to tug at the heart strings of people who make one-tenth of what the developers are making. It’s feels like Scrooge asking Tiny Tim for a donation.
Anyway, I don’t blame the developers for this absurd situation, and I do appreciate Signal, and Meredith is clearly a cool person who is fighting the good fight against big tech surveillance. But every once in a while an article like this reminds me how deeply fucked up the world is. It seems we are approaching pre-French Revolution levels of economic disparity, and maybe it helps explain why so many working class people are pissed off.
This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990 and you pay yourself less than some of your engineers.
Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.
So, I googled their tax filing out of curiosity. It’s true that Meredith pays herself much less than her engineers, which is great. What I was rather shocked to see is that they pay their software developers enormous salaries. They’re listing developers making over $400,000 per year, with their VP making over $660,000 per year. Now, I’m all for the value-creators making more money than the CEO. I just had no idea that software developers make that kind of coin. I was thinking of donating to Signal, but I’m kind of weirded out by those astronomical salaries.
Hold up there, cowboy. Hawaiian pizza is Canadian cuisine, not American.
Years ago, I was hanging out with a manager of finance and asking a few basic questions about finance. After a little while, i guess she got tired of the conversation because she handed me her old finance textbook.
Anyway, I was mostly interested in the foundational ideas of finance, not the details, so I went away and started reading the introduction. It turns out that the introduction was very short, no more than two pages. It was extremely well-written, simple, and to the point.
The foundational idea of modern finance, according to this standard textbook, is very simple and highly reductionist: the one and only goal of finance is to maximize shareholder value, and share prices are the ultimate way that goal is measured. I’ve never seen a whole discipline reduced to such stark and prosaic terms with absolutely no attempt to articulate ethics or justify it in relation to some wider public good.
This is so true. My own daughters, who I raised from birth, and who I tried to inculcate with good sense…yes, even they…they tolerate ads. I know, I know. It is hard to believe. But I have personally witnessed them watching Youtube ads with apparent interest. That was a hard day.
They only bring in the lawyers when something is truly fucked, like the Board taking control from administration. They usually take over when the time has come to investigate fraud, dismantle or otherwise heavily restructure the company.
It’s true that generational improvement in social acceptance of diversity should not be taken for granted. However, I do think it follows fairly predictably with prosperity. When people feel confident in their economic prospects, they are more open to change that benefits others. The opposite is true as well. So, while the universe may not have a strict “natural order” in terms of social progress, the arc of human history shows a strong correlation between economic prosperity and social progress.
“Jesus H. Christ, how is this gonna help us against the Russkies, Larry? I ain’t spendin’ one red cent on this ancient history nerd bullshit. We got commies to catch! Or, uh, whatever the Russkies are nowadays. Throw that FOI shit in the fuckit bucket, goddammit.”
It is true that they could resurrect the tapes if they had a compelling reason to do so. Denying the request indicates that they don’t believe the reason to be sufficiently compelling to warrant the extra expenditure of resources. That is subtley different from “we don’t want to”, which implies a level of capriciousness.
Government departments get FOI requests all the time and they take resources to fulfill. FOI is not intended as a way to have taxpayers fund people’s pet projects. That’s why FOI law doesn’t require your government to spend (even more) money to acquire technology they don’t have or need for anything other than the FOI request itself. Rather, something that requires that kind of extra effort and expenditure should be submitted as a research request, normally with its own funding.
Uh-oh, you’ve triggered one of my favourite topics: cost-conscious cruising. Get ready, because I do enjoy dispelling myths about sailing. :)
People think sailing is expensive, but it is absolutely within reach for the middle class, as long as you are willing to put in the work to do your own maintenance and repair. Look at your average small-city marina and you’ll see that most of the sailboats are 30 to 40 year old fiberglass production boats. They basically last forever if you take care of them and at that age their cost depreciation curve has plateaued. So, the cost of entry is reasonable and relatively risk-free.
If you have any interest in sailing, I recommend checking out your local marina to see if they have a weekly keelboat race. Many sailors love to race and they always need crew. This is the best way to learn to sail for free. If you don’t like the pressure of racing, you can sign up for a learn-to-sail course for a couple hundred dollars.
If you enjoy that experience and want to cruise, I suggest reading a few practical books about cost-conscious cruising. Don’t watch the hot young video bloggers sailing million-dollar catamarans for YouTube and Instagram. Much like Linux vs Windows or open-source vs closed-source, sailing is as much about philosophy as it is about execution. You can spend big bucks on the latest and greatest, or you can buy old hardware and revive it with some learning and elbow grease.
The most common question in cruising is, how much does it cost? And the answer is, strangely, it costs as much or as little as you want to spend. You can spend millions or thousands of dollars, depending on your skills, your willingness to learn, and what you are willing to live with. I know a couple that lived for a year sailing the US East Coast in a 22-foot sailboat that they got for free. That’s an extremely small cruising boat, by the way, with just a bucket for a head.
Think of sailboat cruising like living in an RV: you can live in an old 1965 VW camper van or a tent trailer or fancy stainless steel Airstream or a huge diesel Winnebago. It’s up to you, but there are trade-offs. You can probably buy a broke-down old camper van on the cheap right now, if you are willing to learn to fix it up and then live in a very small space. Or you can work and scrimp for half a lifetime to afford that huge Winnebago. Most of us would pick something in the middle, making trade-offs between comfort, time, and cost.
A good book to start thinking about the philosophy of cost-conscious sailing is “Get Real, Get Gone” by Rick Page. Their philosophy is that small and simple is better than big and fancy for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is affordability and the ability to get started sooner than later. But be careful. If you read it, you may ditch your life ashore and end up a sea gypsy floating around the Caribbean in a small boat learning to fix diesel engines!
Also, by the way, there are plenty of smart, nerdy, do-it-yourself sailors. There is significant overlap in attitudes and mindset between the do-it-yourself sailor and the self-hosting computer nerd.
But truly, I hope I have convinced you that sailing is not only for the rich. It is for the adventurous. As a matter of fact, I’m heading out today for a week of wilderness sailing on board my very affordable sailboat. Maybe I’ll see you out there one day!
There is a certain satisfying symmetry to sailing the high seas while sailing the high seas.
Well sure. Modern war is all about adaptation. Exploding pagers were never going to be a knock-out blow, just a clever psy-op. One among many, I’m sure.