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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • You have to put on a show that you are sticking to those processes, on paper. But the fines for data breaches are generally way less than they save on not having a fully funded IT department and using security products that someone got a kickback for rather than the best product.

    “Hacking” isn’t some magical, intensely creative process for geniuses loke on TV. For the most part, it’s usually just finding the really common things that IT departments don’t do because they are underfunded and treat IT people like replaceable cogs. There is software out there to exploit those deficiencies. So they are forced to do things like use default or obvious admin passwords because who knows who is going to be there tomorrow to fix something and without the proper tools to store credentials, there’s no way to properly secure things.

    And when a security vulnerability is found, there’s a reason why many don’t bother informing the company before going to the media. Those companies pour tons of money into lawyers to avoid admitting the fault, often getting the innocent person who found the problem arrested, and never fix the actual issue. Just ask any pro whitehat security researcher not hired by the company all the things they have to do to protect themselves from being sued or arrested for “hacking” when they notice a problem.

    And government technical auditors are a rarity because the regulators are underfunded. So they might go through some small list of things during regular audits, but they don’t know to check if a DBMS system that contains backups and is stored “in the cloud” is using a default password or other common hacking targets. Hackers don’t go after the primary infrastructure most of the time. It’s not necessary because there are so many sloppy processes or left over insecure projects that “the last guy” was working on or that got defunded before it was completed, but only the primary infrastructure gets audited usually because that’s all there is time and money for.

    As for going somewhere else, there often aren’t other places to go and when there are they usually have the same problem because there’s very little reason for any of them to compete with each other. Most industries have consolidated so much that there are only a handful of parent companies left so it’s easy to collude just because their leaders are often all in the same room at conferences and such.



  • Sales tax is different. That pays for the infrastructure to get the goods to market, theoretically. Though admittedly that is not exactly true everywhere, the general idea of sales tax is for economic reasons, not residential.

    And of course it’s not going to be 100%, but we’re talking about large portions of the population that were purposely excluded, e.g. women, slaves, etc., in the past, and currently lots of people of all genders and races who live in Puerto Rico, Guam, D.C, etc…

    PR alone accounts for over 3 million adults, or about 1% of the US population, with little to no representation, most of them citizens. Wyoming only has about 580,000 people, or about 0.17% of the population, but controls 2% of the Senate, 0.23% of the house, and 0.56% of the presidential election.


  • If only there was reasonable competition, or basically anywhere else I could get certain things without paying a crap load for shipping small things. Even in large cities there just aren’t stores that sell certain things like electronics parts, high quality brand tools, etc. The big box stores just don’t carry a lot of stuff. Not to mention soaps that I use for sensitive skin which places like Walmart doesn’t carry, but the drug stores all got bought out and closed down and the few left now have mostly empty shelves, too. Without Amazon, I just can’t get a lot of things I need or want without traveling hundreds or thousands of miles, and I live in a major city.


  • Never existed in the US. Women, slaves, prisoners, permanent residents, etc… It’s always been in the hands of the rich. They just pretend to listen to the people. But as Trump has many times noted, the vote doesn’t matter. The state can send delegates with any instructions they want and the federal government can decide state delegates are not valid and exclude them. Most states have laws to follow the vote, but it’s not the federal government’s job to enforce those laws if they chose not to follow them. That would be for the people of that state to fight later.











  • I stay away from proprietary stuff when there are great open source alternatives out there. A proprietary system will always be more driven by those funding it, than the needs of the user and nearly always turn users into products, selling their information.

    I’ve been using Firefox variants for a while. I use LibreWolf on desktop and Mull on mobile and a self hosted sync server so it works seamlessly. But there are others, or just use Firefox and disable or block telemetry. There are a few sites here and there that I don’t have the choice not to use and don’t like the privacy features or don’t render properly, so I keep Chrome around for emergencies. But that’s rare, mostly government sites.



  • Your links proved my point, not the opposite.

    France doesn’t have a storage place and desperately needs one. Same with Japan or the Fukushima disaster would have been much less impactful. They are closer to having one, but many scientists say their solution is not going to work permanently due to corrosion and earthquakes. Similar reasons to why the US stopped building their own storage facilities. They aren’t permanent enough and eventually will probably leak and require expensive, dangerous maintenance or abandoning the land, among other issues and cost overruns.

    As for reprocessing, the basic science is there, and has been for a long time. But it never has been and likely never will be profitable thus the headline using the word “could” and no one having built a prototype reactor. Fusion tech is closer to a usable state than these and different reactors produce different waste that requires different reactors to reprocess partially. Then to further process, a different reactor is required, etc. It’s not a simple process and the energy it produces might pay for maintaining the facilities, but not for the development costs to turn theoretical technology into workable engineering designs or the construction costs.

    Renewable energy is much more profitable when you include the cist of storage or reprocessing of nuclear waste, so as soon as companies have too much to store, they’ll leave the rest to taxpayers and move on.