That's why central bank digital currencies are the way to go - same amount of trust as the (real) base currency and near-cash-level privacy (modulo implementation details)
I always wonder how much (relevant) sigcom satellites can nowadays collect given the ever-growing increase in encrypted traffic, especially from the most interesting targets like foreign militaries.
Even in the 1960's most Soviet radio traffic would have been encrypted. That was why the US did things like Ivy Bells (1), because they wouldn't be encrypting domestic phone traffic. (They were able to get information on Soviet missile tests, after the fact, from that source.)
And of course, as always, the easiest way to break a code is always the 5 dollar wrench attack (something like the way the Soviets paid the Walker spy ring a few thousand dollars a month to just give them the decryption keys (2)).
Finally, there is Radio MASINT that also gathers information from radio receivers, even if they are encrypted (3).
There are now commercial signit satellites. I would assume that they can track mobile devices since that would be the main market. Since everything is encrypted now, I bet they are focused on finding locations and identities of devices.
Keep in mind the purpose of these satellites often isn't to intercept the communications. A major use of ELINT to to detect and locate active radars. You don't actually care what the radar is detecting or anything like that, you are trying to identify where the radar is, what kind of radar system, maybe measure the frequency and power to get a sense of its performance, etc.
And when you are trying to actually collect communications, sometimes you can get a lot just from the metadata. Even if you don't know the content of the communications, you can know that at time T, emitter A sent a message on frequency F using protocol P, lasting for duration D and transmitting B bytes. Depending on the communication mechanism, you could also determine the intended destination as well. Even if that data is perfectly encrypted, there's a lot you can do with just traffic analysis, especially when you look at patterns over time and try to correlate this with known events.
Imagine if the US tested some classified missile over the ocean, and some unknown ship nearby broadcast something, and minutes later a bunch of encrypted transmissions are detected at various places in China, places that don't usually send communications at that particular time or that particular volume. That would be a clue that those locations are related to Chinese military intelligence. Comparing exact timestamps, and looking at what happened during similar tests in the past, you can narrow that down further.
And that's just in peacetime. In an active war, this information becomes far more useful. Anything transmitting a lot of data near the frontlines is probably something worth targetting. Maybe just an information relay point, or maybe the headquarters of an armored division. You can also look at the volume of traffic and try to discern intentions. A big spike in the amount of communications in a particular region, followed by near radio silence? That's probably the start of an offensive.
As a non-American, my personal concern for Democracy in regards to the USA is the questionable system of the electoral college which, in my opinion, is one of the worst forms of representative democracy on the planet and certainly not apt for a country so proud of its democratic values.
This also goes hand-in-hand with the black-white thinking of a two-party-system.
If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
It's going to happen in EU in some form as well (assuming EU goes into closer integration direction) because there is no way small countries accept closer union without a mechanism similar to electoral college.
> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now. Thus when we are forming a union we stipulate that we have equal voting rights.
That's not how the electoral college works. The electoral college equivalent would be one village with 1000 people, the second with 2000, and the third with 4000, and each village getting "electoral votes" proportional to their population that gets awarded entirely to the candidate with the majority vote in that village. The entirety of the first two villages vote for candidate A, which awards 1 electoral vote for the first village and 2 electoral votes for the second. In the third village, which has 4 electoral votes, candidate A only gets 1999 votes, whereas candidate B gets 2001 votes, so they win the electoral vote 4-3 and become the leader despite only winning 2001 votes overall out of 7000.
The reason that the analogy needs to be this complicated is because the electoral college isn't some sort of common-sense system that happens to occasionally produce quirky results; it's an extremely contrived system that produces equally contrived results, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.
> If my village forms a union with your village and both our villages have 1000 inhabitants at the time I don't want your village to be able to dictate our common policy just because you have more children or more people died in my village 20 years from now.
> States gets electoral votes based on census and then they decide how to split them.
How is this any different than the original problem you cited before? The majority of a state deciding to allot the entirety of its votes to a single candidate based on a majority of the internal vote is pretty much exactly what you described. That makes sense for a state-wide office like a senator or governor, but there's absolutely no reason that it should work like that for a national election. The only possible argument I could imagine is that it's an attempt to make sure that people in each state have their priorities represented, but it does the _opposite_ of that by rendering what's usually over 40% of the votes in each state entirely meaningless, and that's not even mentioning the fact that states aren't monolithic entities with uniform concerns but populations of individuals who might care about different things.
There's no point in mincing words here; the electoral collage is a construct designed to give states the power at the expense of the individuals in the state. I'm sure there are people who would argue that's a good thing, but I'd argue it's an anachronism from a time when most people had far less access to education and far fewer concerns that ranged beyond their local area. Granted, at the time I'm writing this it's not clear which way the popular vote went in 2024, but that doesn't change the fact that in the presidential elections preceding this one, the "winner" lost the popular vote a third of the time across two decades, so this isn't a theoretical concern.
I think you’re misunderstanding the problem (or I am), the problem is the winner-takes-all per state, not that voting ratios between states are fixed (they aren’t BTW).
The US voting system doesn't even solve that one "problem" you are presenting. The number of districts and votes are constantly adjusted to population.
States elect Presidents, not the People. If you knew anything about why states exist at all, and their history in Constitutional law, and that they have far greater sovereignty than any other country's sub-national political division, you'd understand why the electoral college system exists.
The margin is so large that it doesn't matter (I did check before commenting). Something truly spectacular and unprecedented needs to happen for Harris to win the popular vote.
This is completely untrue. While Trump is favored, there are around 7 million votes left to count in California alone. Predominantly from major cities. Harris is expected to gain a net of almost 3 million from that
No it's not. Harris has less than a 1% chance of winning the popular vote at this stage. You can put $100 on her right now and make $20K when she wins.
That's not how I read it when I looked earilier, but we'll see how it turns out. I can't be bothered to check again, and I don't think it's an important point to argue right now. For what it's worth, I hope you're right and I'll gladly be wrong here.
Counting votes for days/weeks. No ID laws. States not allowing pre-counting votes. States not allowing early voting. Having to wait 7 hours to vote at some polling locations vs 10 minutes at others. Allowing some forms of state agency issued ID to vote but not others.
I'm sure everyone from every side can come up with their own list. How about we solve it all once and for all.
Counting for days is not OK. To ensure fair counting you need to have poll watchers from all interested parties present during voting and counting, and it is difficult to be present over 96 hours period - people need to sleep, and they can't observe the ballots repository or counting while they sleep.
There is no reason why all ballots can't be counted it a few hours. If more people are needed to do it, then so be it.
Second time in the current millennium is probably the talking point you saw; Reagan was the the last Rep president to win two terms with a popular vote majority.
I would argue the Democratic Party is hardly "left-wing". The old joke is that the US has two parties: the right wing party and the very right wing party. They have moved a bit to the left though, but many "left wing" policies they support have broad universal support among the left and right in Europe. Today it's more the centre/centre-right party and the monster raving looney party.
But yes, the system is not great. This matters even more in the senate elections by the way, where every state gets two senators regardless of population size. I get the argument that you don't want densely populated cities dominating large swaths of rural areas, but 1) elections are about people and not trees, and 2) now it's the reverse where sparsely populated rural areas dominate. So...
All true, and I feel there's hope that this is the wake-up call the American left needs; that if they keep playing the role of the centrist establishment what they end up crafting is a super boring campaign that no one feels the passion to get out and vote for. Total voter turnout this election is shaping up to be significantly lower on the left (-15M currently) versus the right (-3M) as compared to 2020.
I think the takes that this is the right taking over America etc are super doomerist. The more accurate story is: The left put up a really boring, bad candidate. The only campaign the left has figured out how to run for literally the past three elections is "stop Trump", and its not even resonating with their own voters anymore. What are they going to run on in 2028 when there isn't a Trump to stop anymore?
The left needs to wake up and have a Trump moment of their own.
Trump is incredibly boring. All he does is throw insults and is obsessed with personal loyalty. He has barely any meaningful ideas at all, and has very little interesting to say. It's almost all just politics of grievances and whipped up anger, at times based on abject malicious lies.
That really is the problem: one side runs a nihilistic campaign completely unencumbered by any truth, morality, or any sense of decency, and the side, well, doesn't. There are two sets of rules and two games being played here. That much has been obvious for almost a decade now. So how do you counter that? Well, no one really knows.
The little he has to say still got him the most powerful position in the world, which is a problem. I am thoroughly afraid of his capability to destroy and deceive.
Progressive policies are broadly popular; inevitably, some totalitarian and intolerant wokeists always end up hijacking the progressive wing, driving the center rightward.
There is a President of the European Council (Charles Michel, elected by member countries' heads of state), there is a President of the European Commission (Ursula von der Leyen, elected by the European Parliament), and there is a President of the European Parliament (Roberta Metsola, elected by the members of the parliament).
Seats in the European Parliament are not proportionally allocated (small countries have more seats per capita), and member countries have different systems for allocating their seats among representatives, but nobody uses first-past-the-post, maybe except Hungary (debatably - their system is weird).
So, no, none of the "EU presidents" are elected by popular vote strictly speaking, and none of them have a role that is even remotely similar to the US presidency.
- Too expensive.
Nuclear power plants usually operate for 40-80 years, making their ROI after the 20 year mark (greatly varies). The report's choice of "10-15 years" for a return on investment is suspicious, as it corresponds more to the life of PVs and wind turbines.
- Too slow.
The first instances of a new design always take longer than the mass production instances. It's madness to compare prospective factory-manufacturable reactors to the behemouth reactors we are used to today. (Also, from memory, I think Japan once made one of those behemoth reactors in 22 months... delays are often not for technical reasons).
- Too risky.
Without storage and/or distribution solutions, renewables will inevitably depend on fossil fuels; this applies both to service economies and manufacturing economies. The difference is that nuclear captures is externalities, unlike fossil fuels.
- A bad fit.
I actually agree with this one in some cases. For example, Australia has abundant land and great weather; they could probably get by with pure renewables. However, countries like Germany (which has so-so weather and some heavy industry) would be hard-pressed to do the same. They could achieve 100% renewables by giving up certain industries, but I don't think that's reasonable to ask.
- The Boeing Problem
Boeing's fall from grace has everything to do with perverse incentives and regulatory failure. If the public is crucifying them for dodgy planes, I imagine they'd do even worse for making dodgy reactors. Regulation is a must for nuclear, and never has anyone serious thought otherwise.
I love nuclear stuff, and I agree with you that SMR have a very good chance to become cheaper. I think we, the society, should invest in nuclear (specific nuclear fission) because of the immense energy density of uranium and thorium.
Yet, I think reaching our climate goals is entirely doable without nuclear.
Why? Net zero does not mean zero emissions. It means emissions equal to sinks. Right now in the US all the emissions coming from natural gas power plants are equal to all the sinks (generally forests) [1]. When I tell people that they are surprised. Here's the numbers: electricity contributes 25% to the emissions, and natgas power plants generate 45% of the emissions associated with power generation [2]. So 11.25% of emissions come from these power plants. The greenhouse gas sinks for the US are at 13%.
So, if we ditch all the coal power plants (which is happening right now, at high speed) and we build a lot of solar and wind, and keep all the current natural gas power plants as peakers, then we will be well below net zero.
> For example, Australia has abundant land and great weather; they could probably get by with pure renewables.
Maybe we (Australians) can do 100% renewable. We will see. But even if we never do (and it's not entirely clear how it's possible), it's hard to see a place for nuclear here.
Since you say you follow this closely, you are probably aware one Australia state is at 70% renewables. That's 70% average, over a year. Unlike other places you hear about with a lot of renewables, South Australia has no hydro. Like the rest of Australia SA is pretty flat, so it has no pumped storage either. In fact there is nothing special about SA at all, other than it has no coal or gas, and is at least 500km from anywhere else of note so transmission lines cost a small fortune. It's not an ideal place for renewables, but beggars can't be choosers.
I'd love to say SA hitting 70% was a master stroke of forward planning. It was anything but. You will hear some politicians claim the did it for climate change. Maybe it was, but what they did happened to coincide with taking cheapest option on the table at the time, over and over again. Solar and wind are damned cheap when they are only contributing 10%. Getting to 70% is more expensive, but they already had the natural gas peakers so at each step the options on the table were to import more natural gas, or put up a wind turbine and use less gas. Each % reduction gets asymptomatically more expensive of course. Over provisioning helps, but typically solar drives the price negative during the day now. They claim they will get to 100% in 2027, but without storage I don't have a clue how that's possible without using the transmissions lines to states with coal generators and some creating accounting.
It's possible the current 70% made the grid a unstable. It's hard to know. They did loose power for days, but the proximate causes were some transmission lines were blown over in the worst storm in decades, inter-state interconnects were down for maintenance, and wind turbines tripping out because of the spikes created by the first two. I'd love to say that had been anticipated and they were the victim of delays in building storage, but storage was deemed to be a money losing proposition. Hell, I'd even like to say the engineers stood up and said "we can fix this with a battery", but that didn't happen either. What actually happen is there was a political shit storm over whether the outage was caused by renewables, and the SA government found itself under an enormous amount of pressure to announce a fix. Elon, the masterful dick waving salesman that he is, proclaimed he could fix the issue by installing the world's biggest battery in 100 days - or it was free. It made headlines around the country, and they took him up on it despite the fact that it cost a small fortune and everyone knew it would lose money.
This is how the decision making process has always been. A complete cluster created by special interest groups fighting over their preferred way. It seems everyone hopes to win the fight by yelling at each other, including engineers like yourself. In the end the pollies throw their hands in despair and choosing the easiest option at the time. Everyone, and I do mean everyone including the engineers was wrong about that battery. It made money from the day it was installed. Turns out when a coal fired generator trips out and removes megawatts from the system in a single 50Hz cycle, to the computer controlling that battery that 20 milliseconds looks like an eternity. It can react in microseconds and dump compensating power into the system long enough for a peaker to fire up. And charge a small fortune for doing it. Apparently no one foresaw this, and so no serious grid scale batteries were added. Now everyone has seen they make money new battery installations are springing up like weeds all around the country. Again I'd love to say they are doing it for the climate or for grid stability but no, they are doing it to get on the gravy train. The way we are going about this transition is nothing if not consistent.
Predicting what the end game looks like seems like fools errand to me. 100% renewable seems dubious. But they are at 70% now, so somewhere above 80% seems reasonable by 2030. Maybe they will start building pumped storage by 2050 - stranger things have happened. But using an SMR to fill that 20% gap - that's beyond strange. It's a shitty 20%. You are off most of the time. You have to go from 0 to full peak within an hour or so when the wind stops blowing and the sun ain't shining, and then from full peak back to 0 on a dime. Nuclear might be good at a lot of things, but the one thing it's absolutely hopeless at is load following. Japan having the worlds highest percentage of nuclear is also why Japan has the most pumped storage per unit generation.
The economics aside, nuclear would require a lot of forward thinking and commitment. Clearly when it comes to power generation that hasn't been Australia's strong suite. I don't see it but maybe there is some place in the world that is different. (Who could possibly have thought buying gas from Russia was a good idea?) China would be a good candidate I guess. China does have a 30 year plan for building nuclear. But with the price plummeting on renewables it looks like they've now abandoned it in all but name as they are adding more renewables each year than the nuclear plan called for over it's entire lifetime.
I wonder how central bank digital currencies will play into this. E.g. for the digital Euro, the ECB intends it to be included under legal tender [0] laws making acceptance of digital cash mandatory wherever you can pay in cash (i.e. every physical POS).
I expect most digital wallets to be made obsolete by such a measure, because most of the use of a digital wallet as described by the post is easy, nearly free digital transactions by end-users. Everything else can be done using your regular bank account. An ECB-backed alternative to Paypal, Venmo, Cash App et al. would certainly be more trustworthy to citizens and the compulsory acceptance by merchants will artifically solve the chicken-egg problem that most such private companies have.
Ditto for debit cards, which would pose a threat to Visa and Mastercard.
I'm curious what kind of ecosystem will exist around CBDCs.
This is a common misconception around the definition of legal tender.
A shop is perfectly within their rights to refuse to sell you something if you are not willing to use their accepted payment methods.
Legal tender simply means they can't sue you if you offer to settle their debt using a legal tender currency. If they have refused to sell you the item, there is no debt, therefore no obligation to accept any particular instrument
While that may be legally the case right now, the EU explicitly intends to limit this practice. E.g. in the proposal on the legal tender of cash published last year by the Commission [0], which will also apply to the digital euro, it mandates:
"To ensure the effectiveness of the legal tender of cash, this Regulation applies also to ex ante unilateral exclusion of payments in cash and to the access to cash", where ex ante unilateral exclusion of payments is defined as "a situation when a retailer or service provider unilaterally excludes cash as a payment method for example by introducing a ‘no cash’ sign. In this case, the payer and payee do not freely agree to a means of payment for a purchase;"
In Article 7, the regulation requires that member states monitor this practice and, if it undermines the intention of the legal tender (i.e. merchants must sell you goods for cash), they shall apply "remedial measures".
Also:
IANAL, but at least in Germany, implied-in-fact contracts render the contract of purchase "signed" the moment you receive the good over the counter from the merchant. If you haven't payed by then, you are in debt to the merchant and from what I would say, the legal tender rules apply.
I tried the same thing, and while I managed to patch the application and intercept the requests, I gave up when trying to RE the shared object responsible for request signing. I couldn't even find the entry point. For a relatively small social media app they had insane security already back in 2015.
Ha, same. I think I was eventually trying to hook into kernel-level functions and do it that way (I was using the Android client) but couldn't get far there either, though I think it's technically doable. IIRC, they were using some kind of vtable patching protection around kernel functions to ensure integrity.
I built anti-cheat software (and hardware) before, and it felt like anti-cheat level security. I had an axe to grind with Snapchat, as they rejected me after the first interview round :P
Snapchat’s founding principle and only differentiator from day one has been untrusted client security. There were way too many years where the general public believed that a Snapchat could not be saved. I give huge credit to Snapchat for accidentally teaching the public that if human eyeballs can see something, it can be recorded forever. Now that is taken for granted, even last week’s Saturday Night Live TV sketch referenced what a fundamentally flawed security model Snapchat has.
What? That wasn't a principle of theirs. They explicitly exclude "screenshot detection avoidance" from their bug bounty policy: https://hackerone.com/snapchat?type=team . They always have. As far as they're concerned, that's not a security issue.
For the uninitiated: TikTok is known to send and receive telemetry packages through headers in other requests (IIRC), and employs the use of a virtual machine(!) to execute encrypted client code.
