
Detection of Rapidly Growing Informal Settlements - marksteve
https://github.com/thinkingmachines/geoai-immap
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fuckthemachine
Kinda shameful to boast about a project designed to make it easier for
'authorities' to displace people who are just trying to 'live' some kind of
existence.

Please don't justify it with weird edge-cases like 'oh but we can detect drug
cartels' or some BS.. This is about forcing people to conform to a designed
western capitalist modality that expects humans to be happy living as battery-
farmed chickens..

* get an education so you start out life with an 80k debt so you: * get a high tax paying job so you can aspire to: * get a home mortgage for the next 45 years with a bank so you: * support the system that funnels money and power to the few at the top.

This project is just another small rivet in the armor of that system which you
should be fighting to de-construct not re-enforce.. wake up and realise you're
building your own cage.

If I buy land to start a community on it of like-minded people who don't feel
comfortable supporting an oppressive system that creates injustice then that's
my business, when are software engineers going to realise we have an
OBLIGATION to HUMANITY to refuse to create the chains that bind us to the
wheel of oppression?? JUST REFUSE, it's OK! you can get a job elsewhere! You
don't NEED to build another system for a company who makes money supplying the
technology that governments use to keep their population compliant to the
machine.

~~~
slumpt_
Completely on point, but this community leans conservative/libertarian and
will quite likely not see eye-to-eye with you on this.

~~~
fuckthemachine
I've watched the up/downvote bounce -1 to 1 for the last 40 minutes :)

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jessaustin
Clicking through to their sponsor [0], one finds that the purpose of this
endeavor is to find undocumented immigrants. Theoretically this would be
useful if one wanted to give them food and medicine, but here in the real
world there is little cause for celebration.

The best thing we could do is the best thing we could always do: stop the
sanctions and aggressive militarist actions.

[0] [https://immap.org/colombia/](https://immap.org/colombia/)

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Kednicma
It's a missing link in our modern sci-fi dystopia. This sort of tooling is how
the drones know where to fly to hunt down the intentional community of rebels
trying to take down the oppressive systems. The fact that we are using this
tooling for ethnofascist tracking of undesirable people is not accidental, but
is basically the intended use of the tooling as designed.

What's interesting to me is that this work was funded by a non-profit and
under the guise of humanitarianism. They went in through the front door and
got legitimacy and funding.

~~~
jessaustin
Lots of "humanitarian" work in Colombia are CIA-funded fronts for anti-
socialist and anti-indigenous violence. For example, see the "aid convoy" that
Maduro supposedly burned. In general many nonprofits don't care to look too
closely at their donors. Lots of money is floating around, searching for a way
to oppose Venezuelan democracy. Colombian ruling elites are eager to cash in
on the gravy train, and the disdain they feel toward the poor and indigenous
of Venezuela is actually less than that they display toward those groups in
their own nation.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Be that as it may in terms of secretive support for anti-government efforts
against a government that the U.S doesn't like for assorted political and
often hypocritical reasons, you're deluded if you think the monstrous Maduro
Regime is in any sense a good guy in the situation that Venezuela is going
through. Opposing it is hardly opposing democracy, given that this government
itself is grossly anti-democratic and repressive whenever it feels threatened.

~~~
Kednicma
Of course; there are no good people, anywhere, at all; good is a fiction that
we tell each other in order to justify our atrocities.

In this particular instance, it can be the case that _all of_ the Colombian,
Venezuelan, and American governments are committing crimes against humanity.

~~~
shadowprofile77
This kind of whataboutism does nothing good for anyone who appreciates honest
debate. It only helps further cement dishonest arguments. Yes, the U.S has its
hands full of cloak and dagger blood from who knows how many regime changes
it's been complicit in or a direct cause of (not to mention the deaths caused
by its direct invasions), and Colombia has a long, sordid history of human
rights abuses by all sides.

Despite these things, both of those countries are internally, practically far
better places to live in than Venezuela for both economic reasons and in terms
of individual/political freedom. Venezuela is all the opposite in so many more
ways. What's more, it is distinctly a repressive state that does not at all
allow free elections and whose executive government branch does everything
possible, legally or not, to rig all state structures for its own
perpetuation. Meanwhile, this same government's economic mismanagement has
achieved catastrophic, humanitarian disaster depths of damage.

More basically, whatever the sins of the U.S or Colombia or whichever other
country you pick, not one of them excuses any aspect of what the Chavez/Maduro
governments have done to their own country.

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csense
What in the world is this?

"Informal settlement" suggests someone's trying to hack the system, that is
the social / legal / administrative system for real estate, as in physical
land and buildings. But I don't quite understand the purpose, motivation, and
mechanics of the hack.

Are these enterprising individuals that built houses on a vacant parcel they
don't actually own, hoping the real owners would stay away for 20 years or
however long they need to establish squatters' rights? It seems like an
incredibly gutsy gamble with an awful risk/reward profile. Surely if you have
the resources to build that many buildings, it would certainly be within your
means to simply buy the vacant land outright, you know, _before_ you built a
single structure, and then maybe build 2/3 as many houses in case your
bankroll was stressed by buying the land?

Or maybe they do own the land, but are hoping the local zoning board is more
likely to grant forgiveness than permission? So they build houses where they
aren't supposed to be built, and hope to get away with it since no one will
want to tear them down once they've been constructed?

Maybe it's some kind of tax scam where they don't tell the government the
land's been improved and hope to pay property tax on empty land while
collecting rent from all the houses? But surely tax assessors will drive by at
some point and notice that, y'know, there are buildings there now which sure
doesn't match what's in the records? And whoever built them will be in hot
water for lying about the tax status of an entire housing development, and owe
not just back taxes but fines, fees, interest, and maybe even theoretically be
liable for criminal tax fraud? Or maybe they plan to sell the houses and get
out of Dodge, the inaccurate documentation's the buyer's problem, the
contractor's long gone by the time the authoirities catches up with them? But
then wouldn't the sale go amiss when some buyer, y'know, _reads the deed for
the property they 're spending tens of thousands of dollars on_ and notice it
doesn't accurately describe the structures on the land?

It's not exactly out in the countryside, it seems like it's right in an
existing suburban area. So it doesn't look like they're even trying to keep it
secret from people at street level. Explain again, why do they need satellites
and AI image analysis to find this?

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tomjuggler
I was thinking this would be great way for a government to work out allocation
of services and resources. To help its citizens! But no..

