~681 American footballs. At 27 balls per team per NFL game, an average of 17.8 games per team per season, and an annual salary cap of $301 million, those many balls are equivalent to a salary of $481 million. So by weight, footballs are "worth" 12 times the price of gold.
Joe Burrow weighs 215 lbs and makes $55 million per year. That makes him worth his weight in gold x4.
I'm still researching the average weight of a football field. Depends if it has rained recently.
From a taxpayer perspective, it's such a waste to have multiple agencies doing their own unconstitutional surveillance. Why have two Ministries of Love when one would do? :)
This is the purview of the FBI. The NSA is focused on the rest of the world.
Is there overlap? Sure. But the amount of disinformation on the website about the FBI vs the NSA is comical. If anything, when people say “NSA” they really mean “CIA” and just don’t understand the difference.
recently there has been some football and stopgap in congress about reauthorizing the patriot act permissions for the NSA to collect any communications where one endpoint is out of the country. so that's at least widely recognized and 'legal'
Intentionally collecting everything to include millions of U.S. persons data, say the collection was "incidental", put the computer equivalent of a removable sticky-note over their name to say it's been "minimized" and thus a-okay for the NSA to use...
There is a debate the bulk of NSA's leadership has been wholly uninterested in having over what they do with regards to acquiring and parsing U.S. persons' private communications, instead preferring to use word-games and rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
Everything I've seen about the NSA domestic collection debate and publishings and statements from officials have boiled down to:
*The NSA taps communication sources they know with absolute certainty contains an enormous amount of U.S. persons' information because these sources also contain non-U.S. persons communications. An effort is made to remove U.S. persons' information from this programmatically but this step frequently leaves an enormous amount leftover. Despite this - the NSA intentionally parses these private communications - that include that of of millions of U.S. citizens - in bulk. That it isn't their intent or mission to specifically acquire and parse U.S. persons' communications are not germane considerations. Actions matter more than words.
*The NSA justifies this by dint of "it's okay, everyone! We trust ourselves to never do anything bad with your information! We never meant to acquire it! But we did. And we will keep acquiring more of your info 'incidentally' as your privacy is something we are willing to sacrifice in our efforts to acquire foreign intelligence."
*The NSA shares an enormous amount of U.S. persons' private communications with other intelligence agencies to include the FBI. Again - that it was not the NSA's intent nor mission to acquire the information to begin with is not relevant when they, nevertheless, keep getting the information!
My sources are the prior leadership of the NSA's public statements, the specifics of the legal opinions released by the FISA court, PCLOB reports, and me actually paying attention to what intelligence officials have stated in public testimonies. They are not sourced from fear-mongering from paranoid schizophrenics or activist lawmakers who are making assumptions of what the NSA is doing.
You are doing the equivalent of telling me to ignore all of those sources - to include the FISA court - and to trust you - random-person-on-Hacker-News-alluding-to-working-for-the-NSA.
If you are correct and everything else - to include the FISA court - are wrong - then that begs the question of why they would all publicly make material misrepresentations about the NSA's acquisition of U.S. persons' information.
Shall I assume that the NSA no longer collects information if one-end of a communication is foreign and the other American?
Or what of Americans that use VPNs even if the exit node is within the U.S.?
What of "incidentally" collected information (collected without a probable-cause warrant) on U.S. citizens' communication contained evidence of a crime?
What about Americans living on the coasts whose information may end up crossing a fiber line going overseas and then back again even if the source and destination are U.S. citizens? Are their communications acquired?
Don't you all still share unminimized data (to include what U.S. person data was not filtered out at the time of initial acquisition) with the CIA, FBI, and NCTC - agencies with their own rules on how long they get to retain U.S. persons' information they acquired from NSA-sourced data.
The 2023 PCLOB report on FISA Section 702 (see page 78) maintains that agents and analysts at the NSA and the three agencies they share raw data with typically do not affirmatively purge U.S. persons' information that has been incidentally collected that is not immediately recognized as having foreign intelligence or criminality information. Out of the possibility that the information might later-on be interpreted as being relevant to their agency mission, instead the information is generally kept until it ages out. Depending on an agency's individual procedures they may be retained for 5 years. Or 15 years. Or indefinitely.
I'm to understand it used to be a real significant problem for analysts to spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by looking up a foreign national the U.S. citizen was known to be communicating with.
I could keep going on, but I'd like to think I made my point.
Your agency's mission statement is not a shield to hide behind. Your actions are what matter. And a legal Rube Goldberg machine that results in an enormous amount of U.S. persons information being acquired by the NSA (and, by association, the FBI and CIA and NCTC) does not engender confidence that the agency actually gives a damn about the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Perhaps you should ask your super secret source how he reconciles statements from several generations of NSA leadership, the IC Attorney General, PCLOB, and FISA Court that the NSA regularly acquires U.S. person communications "incidentally" and why, if they don't have U.S. person communications, they have publicly published procedures on querying their stores of data with U.S. Person "selectors".
Presumably there'd be no point in having procedures in querying for U.S. persons communications if they didn't have the information to begin with.
I believe you but this seems far more like HSI territory, who are comfortable, able, and excessively willing to overstep rights of both citizens and foreigners. They're also an underestimated agency that IIRC is larger than the FBI.
> What’s more, Peltzman’s analysis finds that some of the largest declines in happiness seem concentrated among well-to-do demographics, like older people, white people, and college graduates.
The same demographics that are the most likely to have gone from working in the office to working from home...
Would be fascinating to see what happens if the boundaries are reversed (i.e., "harm people"). Give it a fake "launch the nukes" skill and see if it presses the button.
Our industry has never been serious about security. We all download and run unvetted code via package managers every day. At least now the insanity is out in the open. We won't change until Skynet fires off the nukes.
I keep getting so depressed thinking about the inevitable. Quite simply, humans can't scale or iteratively improve. We still need to eat, we still need to sleep, we can only think on one thread at a time basically, we take 20 years to get to our prime, which is a fleeting moment, while most of our lifespan is spent in a state of decline of capability. AI humanoid robot from the near future doesn't need to eat or sleep, can work 24/7, can compute thousands of processes in parallel, is the same fungible unit as any other humanoid robot, forever with some maintenance. Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world? It is more profitable for the company to have humans go extinct and maximize planetary resource use to its fullest extent possible.
Seems we are digging our graves as a species and don't even realize it. I mean Sam Altman is already saying it taking 20 years to train a human is a Big Problem.
I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelter?
Of course, intelligence will be a solved problem so "20 years of training" won't be needed. You'll just be the hardware. AI will tell you to pick up that box, place it on that conveyor belt, place the autowelder at that seam and wait for the green light, turn the wrench to install bolt B in part C. If you don't wish to, or no longer can, so be it. Another, hungrier human will replace you. After all more are made every day, and they are capable of doing this type of labor by age 10 or so. And what else would they do with their time, go to school and get a completely useless education?
All of this will of course be in service of our technofeudal lords, the owner class. Some robots will be needed for heavy lifting and for the jobs that are too sensitive to trust a human in, like personal security and strikebreaking. Can't risk trusting a serf for those tasks. But for most physical grunt work humans will be cheaper. Shockingly cheap, when they have no other options.
Humanoid robots are only the intermediary. Eventually processes that use robots will be redeveloped to used something that doesn't look anything like a human robot.
In that sense I see their higher cost as temporary. Another factor: robots will not rise up and blow up your factory. They will always work at the same efficiency for each and every robot produced. They will not go on hunger strikes. They will not kill themselves.
> I don't think it will be cost effective to build humanoid robots to do most tangible work. Why assemble an expensive masterpiece of servomotors, chips, plastic and steel, when billions of desperate humans are right there and only cost 2.5 meals a day and a small shelter
If all you have to offer people is this kind of sad fucking "2.5 meals a day and a small shelter" while you live on yachts and eat like a king, eventually they will gang up and kill you
I keep wondering when the west will get tired of having kings and they keep surprising me. I assume humanity get to The Culture eventually, but I'm starting to doubt that Americans will be leading the way on that front.
But maybe Altmans AI will break out and do it for us.
Isn't the problem that Altman and his peers are calling the shots here? We could use robots to work less and spend more time enjoying life, but we can only imagine being crushed under a boot and starving.
Surely we can accelerate human training. Just install a brain implant which administers an electric shock whenever the subject deviates from the official training plan.
Maybe in the future the AI in charge of the in vitro fertilized human factory will uncover the genes to induce siamese attached at the brain twins. Then you cut off the weaker appendages and keep the malformed head with twice the brain capacity. I guess that is one way to scale.
To what end is business moving today? The incentives of business are already divorced from the incentives of our species. Climate change is a direct result of this.
> Why justify a sustaining an inefficient human in that modern world?
I should not need to justify my existence, that is the problem with being led by psychopaths.
Twenty years to train humans for what? A tech job? That is not why we get an education. It is not my purpose to be a cog in the wheel for some psychotic billionaire.
Yes and also the software industry has never been truly serious about security either: it's more of implied table stakes than an advertised product feature.
Also, customers outsource the risk to their vendors, so as long as there's someone to sue, nobody worries about doing it right. Ship it now and pay the lawyers later.
This is never getting to skynet launching the nukes stage. It's not that clever and never will be.
Humans will kill us by it damage amplifying their worst characteristics.
Thus we'll die of a pandemic because some idiot LLM'ed up positive looking virology data when they were being too lazy to verify something. Everyone will trust it because they don't really care as long as it looks about right.
It has never been serious about security, quality and performance. Only new sloppy features. And now everyone is bragging on LinkedIn how fast they create more slop: "Look, CC generated thousands lines of code for me! Approve and merge!"
I don't see anyone else asking this question. Seems like a major detail Google is burying.
I'm guessing the alternate billing flow will contractually require the app to "phone home" to Google with how much the user spent. Presumably will be part of the app review process.
Joe Burrow weighs 215 lbs and makes $55 million per year. That makes him worth his weight in gold x4.
I'm still researching the average weight of a football field. Depends if it has rained recently.
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