If the Google pattern holds they will decide that users are the problem because they are using GCP incorrectly and then start cutting the support budget to show how much contempt they have for all these misbehaving users and then eventually cancel the project.
Are the simulators run by Boeing or the FAA? Are the test pilots employed by Boeing?
What changes have been made to the regulatory framework to prevent Boeing from signing off on their own safety tests? What changes has the FAA made to bring more public transparency to the flight certification process?
When is the sentencing date for Boeing executives? They are not getting a plea deal I hope?
I'm not worried about the overly complicated flight control software or MCAS, I'm worried about the next system that will fail because nobody at this company seems to care about engineering any more.
Are you talking about criminal court? Call me pessimistic, but I don't think our societal arrangement is such where the people at the top pay the price. I think regulation reform is a more realistic goal.
I'm not sure the FAA is at fault here. From a big-picture perspective, the industry has never been safer.
Obviously, continuous improvement is a core part of quality, and the FAA can always learn and improve their processes, but you can't expect a regulator to shoulder the core responsibility of certifying a plane. The primary responsibility is always going to be on the manufacturer because no regulator will ever have the manpower to test and verify everything nor the deep visibility into to R&D process that a manufacturer would.
They absolutely can with the right amount of funding to maintain attractiveness.
The regulator should be adversarial; period. A well-meaning adversary, but adversarial never the less. Cutting manufacturers as much slack as has been is exactly what got us to the point we're at; a regulator that collected rubber stamped reports and only heard about things going wrong after tragedy has already struck.
It is better to have an active regulator able to intercede than to have the manufacturer coordinating everything internally, and asking for help when needed simply out of interest for removing the possibility to hide a problem discovery by never opening the floor to being questioned by the regulator.
If you tie the regulator's hands, then it isn't a regulator anymore. It's a postmortem service.
Sorry for the delay, but I reject the assertion that you're making here:
>but you can't expect a regulator to shoulder the core responsibility of certifying a plane. The primary responsibility is always going to be on the manufacturer because no regulator will ever have the manpower to test and verify everything nor the deep visibility into to R&D process that a manufacturer would.
In a financially incentivized market-based system where a fiduciary responsibility is built into the very underlying fabric of the corporate calculus, you cannot afford to be blind to the fact that a market actor has every reason and opportunity to stuff off every cost they can to improve their bottom line. This is why we need regulators in the first place, due to opposing optimizations between the interests of shareholders/executives, and the public.
The FAA as a regulator must be capable of requesting and having delivered any piece of information relevant to the goal of airframe certification. It is the job of the manufacturer to satisfy the regulator as to the objective safety of the plane, and it is the regulator's job to ensure nothing is left out for expediency sake. When regulator's start talking about streamlining things for the regulated, I start to get worried.
To go into more detail, no; I do not see the FAA adopting the actual physical task or logistics of testing a plane; however, I do see them as the final authority in terms of "Is the design complete" and "is your testing sufficient?"
This means that an Engineer, free of the inherent bias that comes from being dependent on the manufacturer for their paycheck, and acting in the public's interest as an external agent, needs to be as fully briefed on the entirety of the operating and physical details of every plane. It doesn't need to be the same person with it all; but the point is between the FAA as an external agency, and the manufacturer, there should be two independent agencies with enough understanding of the product that it can be demonstrated the manufacturer has done their due disclosure in informing the flying public of every facet of the aircraft's behavior that nothing like the MAX boondoggle should ever even be considered as being a reasonable course of action ever again.
You had people inside Bboeing who couldn't understand why MCAS was the way it was. Given that, it is evident that the most important stakeholders in being fully informed (buyers and operators) as a consequence were also not informed before regulators cut Boeing loose to sell on the market.
In 2018, legislation was passed that made it even more difficult for the FAA to exercise it's purported authority so long as a corporate representative assured them the issue was being handled internally.
I do expect anyone in an oversight position to be capable of observing things within their purview; and in terms of evaluating designs, the tangible nature of the principles and forces involved with aviation should be conducive to clear communication and reproducibility between the manufacturer and the regulator. The difference to a business in a functioning regulatory regime is that the manufacturer should see it's job as revealing new ground to a regulator, and leveraging the regulator as the source of of friction that peels away any uncertainty from the design. This can only happen in an environment where a "no more secrets" approach to business is maintained.
Yes, I agree that the aviation industry hiding behind the streak of years of no accidents has contributed to how bad Boeing became. They were using that statistic as a shield and a hammer to justify further deregulation.
This is a great example of how looking at the world through the prism of stats really limits your understanding of what's actually happening.
There has been plenty of cynical reporting and editorializing that has made this very argument, that in fact Boeing and the industry more widely has been hiding behind the safety streak up until the moment of the first MAX crash.
The fact that you find my post novel and shocking just shows you're not reading very much about aviation in the past few months.
It's almost like we are intentionally bending over backwards to avoid hiring some human beings to do some real fucking work.
When did this become the mantra of every tech company? Any time a job is created it's viewed as an unfortunate mistake or side effect? Who are we even building all this for?
The promise to investors of "tech companies" is zero marginal cost, and hence infinite scalability. As soon as you have to have to incur meatspace costs per transaction instead of doing it all in software, these sky-high unicorn valuations go out the window.
Don't be silly. Real work would mess up the scam, which works roughly like this:
1) Build a software system that appears to perform a real-world function.
2) Offer that real-world function at a loss.
3) Founders and early investors collect sweet, sweet bagholder dollars.
That, of course is a Ponzi scheme, but the S-1 makes it all legal!
Are you suggesting hiring employees to check every single listing on AirBnB? Does Craigslist verify every listing? For that matter, have newspapers ever done that with their advertising? AirBnB is a marketplace connecting buyers and sellers. Suggesting that a newspaper for instance send an employee to verify that an advertised car in a classified ad is precisely correct is a bit ridiculous but that’s what you seem to be suggesting with AirBnB. How is this any different than a student newspaper running ads for rooms for rent? On the hotel side, Booking.com doesn’t physically verify every hotel room listed either. Overstating amenities or even outright lying is as old as real estate and has nothing to do with “tech.”
When they say “We’re going to verify all our listings” I fucking expect them to verify listings.
When listings cost hundreds to thousands of dollars and they skim a significant fee off every rental they need to take some significant steps to eliminate fraud on their platform.
Craigslist is a horrible example because they don’t profit from most sales, and they don’t process the money between buyer/ seller. If AirBnb worked like CL, you’d be pay your host cash when you show up and if your host tried to pull shit like this you could just walk.
Did you read the original vice article? The airbnb scam is much more harmful than an erroneous classifieds listing. If someone lies on Craigslist and you're smart enough to find out they did you walk away and all that's lost is time. The scammers on airbnb were promising a better place and then had them stay in a place that might as well be a squat. Wasting time, money, comfort, convince, etc.
There are places on Airbnb that have never been rented. How would those places be verified, which is necessary if you want to say "Every listing is verified", if you do anything other than send employees to those places?
Craigslist, Booking etc don't make any claim that all places are verified so they don't need employees to do that work. If Airbnb are going to make that claim then they will need people to do the verifying.
> Are you suggesting hiring employees to check every single listing on AirBnB?
Yes.
Unless they don't actually plan to verify listings, in which case they should just state they don't verify listings. Then they don't have to hire anyone extra.
At this point Mark Zuckerberg's identity is Facebook. He has never had another job, he never took a humanities class, he never did study abroad, he never spent a summer with normal people working a normal job. His entire life is Facebook. They are one and the same.
Try to imagine your whole identity being tied up in this massive company you made. He has no option but to fight as hard as he can, any talk of regulation is an existential threat to Mark himself.
He has never shown a shred of regret or pause about the past mistakes of the company, it has been full steam ahead ignore the haters at all costs since the Beacon fiasco. Nothing is going to change this company unless an external force comes in and makes the change happen in spite of Mark Zuckerberg.
I'd imagine the major intelligence agencies have already started their own genetic databases, right? Being able to track down everyone at a genetic level is insanely valuable data from a national security perspective.
Given that the intelligence agencies regularly and aggressively hack every telecom and networking company out there, it's pretty likely that they have already hacked the commercial DNA databases, no? Why wouldn't they?
I'd like to think there is someone out there trying to protect my data, but it's much more likely they are just aggregating everything into a single genome DB that will inevitably get hacked or leaked.
"I'd imagine the major intelligence agencies have already started their own genetic databases, right?"
The gig is up.
It's a law felons give their DNA in some jurisdictions. Felons have families. Felons have great grand mothers. Felons have 2nd cousins. There are 6.1 million felons. I'd image the US is pretty much mapped out by now.
Some police agencies (NYC, for example) collect DNA samples on arrest. And if you're found not guilty, the arrest was wrong, or whatever, they still keep the DNA forever. [1]
But it's not like they conduct knock-and-spit dragnets. Oh, wait... [2]
Even worse is that social service agencies do it. Don't be born in California, because the fact that you suddenly exist means the state gets your DNA. [3]
A desire to control people for mostly petty reasons in order to better society or some such is what led us here. You know what they say about the road to hell.
> I'm able to refuse the state/hospital in California to take blood samples, right?
As sibling asserts, no you may not refuse. However:
> State law requires that parents are informed of their right to request the child’s sample be destroyed, but the state does not confirm parents actually get that information before storing or selling their child’s DNA. [0]
> "I'd imagine the major intelligence agencies have already started their own genetic databases, right?"
> The gig is up.
Absolutely. Also the Pentagon has another excellent source: It stores DNA fingerprinting for US armed forces personnel (so as to identify the remains of MIA/ KIA soldiers). If you could get your hands on that it would probably help fill in the family trees of people involved in intelligence work - I think it is fairly common for extended families to have lots of people working in defence and intelligence.
Presumably the Chinese can combine the family trees from these DNA databases with information from scraping Facebook/ LinkedIn etc and data from the Office of Personnel Management breach. IMO they should be able to connect DNA samples to people in the US very effectively, the DNA will map to a person or a few people and the Chinese will know the work - including intelligence work for the US government - that those people do. So, for example, if they pick a suspicious USB key or document they can take the skin cells of those who handled the object and identify them.
Not just felons, also everyone who works for a government under a fake identity like undercover agents and spies. Just think of cartels tapping into that resource and checking out new recruits: "So, how come you DNA shows you are the son of a cop, have an aunt at the DEA and a brother at the Sherrif's office?"
Shortly prior to its demise, the Stasi was collecting blood and hair samples and storing them in anticipation of future DNA profiling technology becoming available.
I found "Stasiland" by Anna Funder a good read if you don't mind reading a more general history of the Stasi. There are a few examples in there I believe.
I'm not sure about the DNA sampling, but its been widely reported they did have large collections of "scent jars" which were just as powerful as having someone's DNA:
The Stasi had a whole range of methods and means to try to track down people who said or did anything critical of the East German communist regime. Collecting scent samples was used to try to identify those, for example, who had distributed flyers or who wrote critical graffiti.
When they found a piece of graffiti or a flyer then they took a dust cloth, which was usually yellow, and left it for a while lying next to the flyers covered by a protective piece of aluminum foil and then they had their sample. The cloth was then sealed in a pickling jar and stored. If the Stasi later came across a suspect in the process of the investigation, they tried to get a sample from this person as well -- of course, secretly. A trained dog was given the two smells, and if they matched, the Stasi had a concrete name.
Apparently back in 2007, German authorities were using this same method to track activists trying to disrupt the G8 Summit:
In a reminder of methods used by the East German Stasi secret police, German authorities are collecting human scents to trace activists they believe may try to violently disrupt the G8 summit in June. It's proving highly controversial, and there's no scientific evidence that the method is infallible.
DNA profiling technology did exist shortly before the end of the Stasi (the first use in criminal investigation was in 1987 [1]), though presumably they didn't have access to it.
In news coverage of drone strikes/bombings of sites thought to contain known terrorists, mostly high value targets, I've absolutely heard them say identified/confirmed by DNA. Here is the first example I could find:
>A DNA sample from one of the men killed in the U.S. drone attack was successfully matched with a close relative of Mansour, the interior ministry statement said.
They've been taking biometric samples from millions of Afghanis [0] and Iraqis [1].
Wouldn't be too surprised if those ain't the only countries where US soldiers collect that kind of data.
They were also trying to locate bin Laden in Pakistan through use of sham vaccination programs that were actually taking DNA samples. As a result the loss of trust caused Polio to go from the cusp of eradication to back with a vengeance.
I like the claims with al-Baghdadi's n-th death being DNA confirmed. US obtained a supposed blood sample of al-Baghdadi from his right hand man in return for a promise of $25 million and US residency for himself and his entire family. Then, someone in a tunnel, unseen by anyone other than a dog, was blown up by an explosive belt, leaving no remains but small chunks that could be identified. These were then DNA confirmed to be identical to whoever the blood sample was taken from.
Not a blood sample (EDIT yes a blood sample). His underwear was stolen so his shart remnants could be DNA tested. This by someone close to him who wanted revenge and of course 25 mill. The mole was managed by the SDF who communicated with the US.
> U.S. intelligence tested those samples and got positive DNA matches for al-Baghdadi, kicking the hunt into high gear. The informant stole the underwear about three months ago and the blood sample was taken roughly one month ago, a Kurdish official said.
Curiously the articles suggest they used the blood sample in advance of the raid to confirm it was al-Baghdadi, with no suggestion of what they were comparing it to.
OK, thanks, I was unaware of that. You've changed my mind on the issue that we don't really know who the guy in the tunnel was. So we really did get him.
Captured Feb. 4, 2004 as a civilian and released that Dec. 8 as he was seen as no threat.
> "Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Al Badry, also known as ‘Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’ was held as a ‘civilian internee’ by U.S. Forces-Iraq from early February 2004 until early December 2004, when he was released," the Pentagon said in a statement. "He was held at Camp Bucca. A Combined Review and Release Board recommended ‘unconditional release’ of this detainee and he was released from U.S. custody shortly thereafter. We have no record of him being held at any other time."
This is also interesting. He didn't start at Bucca:
> This is also interesting. He didn't start at Bucca:
That's also a way to not mention the fact that he also served time in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison around the same time the reports on the on-going torture there were finalized.
As such there's a very good chance he not only witnessed but also experienced that [0] kind of torture, just like neither Abu Ghraib, nor Bucca were exceptions during that time [1].
In that context, it wasn't just a random coincidence how ISIS paraded their prisoners around in "horrible orange suits", as Trump put it, completely missing the reference [2], like many US Americans.
I provided a link to an article documenting the evidence he was there and detailing that he was there when they were extensively brutally torturing the prisoners. Abu Ghraib is in the link title.
What source have you read that said there were no remains? Depending on how exactly he blew himself up, there might very well be identifiable remains intact, such as extremities or even the head.
I mean, the vaccines were real. They were just also a front for a government sponsored DNA heist. Given the actions of the US government, it seems reasonable in the current political climate to refuse vaccines and other on-site medical treatment if you don't want your DNA stolen. In recognition of the communal failure to protect privacy which has led to these programs being potential DNA theft operations, vaccination providers should start letting people take their needles home to self-administer vaccines. Whether or not it's likely in any given case is irrelevant, the government used medicine to steal DNA so now we can't trust medicine. Medicine needs to reinvent itself so that vaccines can be widely deployed without risking further data breaches, and the only way they can really do that is by not collecting the data -- even on a needle.
ISTR that the vaccines offered needed several applications spaced over days or weeks; and that the CIA agent did not return to administer the follow up shots. So the vaccines were real but ineffectively administered.
You could create a culture of - after every injection - sterilising the needles in the presence of the injectee. This would be moderately burdensome but wouldn't avoid the need for blood samples for medical diagnostics so wouldn't really protect against malicious actors taking the role of medical professionals. That sort of behaviour simply shouldn't be acceptable to anyone, not even spies.
As pointed out in other threads, the DNA of your relatives is almost certainly in multiple databases already and that will probably be enough to identify you (or at least narrow things down to a few people). We need laws and cultural standards (in all the cultures) for how that information is controlled and used but I have no idea how we get there.
First paragraph: I don't recall reading that in any of the coverage I saw at the time, but I'm not super skeptical of this claim.
Second paragraph: if I don't trust the magician/doctor not to make the needle reappear after it goes in the waste basket, I don't see why I would trust them to not substitute some other liquid for the sterilizing fluid. Even an on-site incenerator is hard to trust, if we're assuming CIA involvement. These people actually hired a magician (John Mulholland) to write a document explaining magician stagecraft to CIA officers as part of the MK-ULTRA program -- they tried to destroy it when they realised congress was going to request those documents, but a copy survived and got republished decades later. I wouldn't trust my own eyes to notice when a well trained agent swapped needles in front of me, and I can't imagine any on-site procedure I would trust as much as taking a needle home with me. As for blood tests, I don't see why I should have to opt into these to recieve vaccines. Medicine can be modular.
Third paragraph: I get that the cat is out of the bag for most people in my country -- I have second-degree relatives who are already in the database. This isn't (yet?) the case for many people living in the third world, which is where most of the backlash to this practice actually occured. I also think that insisting on practices that make future generations more difficult to track are reasonable, even if it will take some time for the genetics to get swashed around enough for these efforts to matter.
This might be wrong but it was reported in some publications at the time: "In March health workers administered the vaccine in a poor neighbourhood on the edge of Abbottabad called Nawa Sher. The hepatitis B vaccine is usually given in three doses, the second a month after the first. But in April, instead of administering the second dose in Nawa Sher, the doctor returned to Abbottabad and moved the nurses on to Bilal Town, the suburb where Bin Laden lived."
I think we'll have to agree to disagree over the possibility or desirability of running low-trust vaccination campaigns. FWIW I upvoted your first comment, even though I disagree with part of it.
> I think we'll have to agree to disagree over the possibility or desirability of running low-trust vaccination campaigns.
I can happily agree to disagree about such things, but I will point out that you still have to live in a world with crazy idealists like myself who will become potential disease vectors if not provided a low-trust mechanism for vaccinating themselves. That isn't intended as a threat, just food for thought when considering cost/risk analysis from your own worldview.
Major intelligence agencies have people working at all these companies like Google, Facebook, 23AndMe, Ancestry.com, etc with unfettered access. Just like how they infiltrated the nuclear programs of various countries and stole secrets, it's the same thing except 100x easier because the level of security is so much lower and easier to hack.
If you don't think that squads of spies for Russia, China, the US, Israel, India AREN'T working at these companies you are woefully naive.
> Given that the intelligence agencies regularly and aggressively hack every telecom and networking company out there
This is a common misconception, as long as we are talking US companies and US agencies, they don't need to do much of that, thanks to the third-party doctrine [0] they do not even need a legal warrant.
Now add in the fact how popular ancestry tests have become, and how even that data is openly monetized, it's not that far of a reach to assume US intelligence agencies have been building their own aggregated DB.
There has already been reporting on people leaving ladders and other tools inside delivered 787s. I'm not sure what Boeing is good at anymore besides gaming regulatory systems.
Business schools are going to study WeWork and Adam in the same chapter as Bernie Madoff and MCI Worldcom. This has been one of the most successful scams of all time.
The fact that it was all legal is just mind-boggling.
Its a perfectly legitimate business that brings in billions of dollars and may even be profitable with some optimization. To call it a scam a la a Ponzi scheme is a little too harsh.
Was it a scam? Adam didn't violate any laws. Investors should have done diligence and all the self dealing would have came out during an audit. Fact they didn't is what i think is the scam. If i was an lp in the fund, i would think about suing the fund for the breach of duty.
Maybe, but this is very different from the original examples of Madoff and Worldcom. Their scams were flagrantly illegal at the time that they did them.
This is fine advice as long as you're under 35 or so, after that you become completely unhireable in many tech companies so you better hang on somewhere.
I've been seeing this "you can't find a job after 35/40/45" meme on HN pop up frequently. This literally can't be true: our economy would have collapsed by now if a large fraction of our population were forced into retirement at 40. If everyone became unemployable at 40, 1/3 of the population would be supporting the other 2/3. Yet instead we see low unemployment.
I don't doubt that age discrimination in tech is real, but I'm pretty sure comments like this are way overstating it.
The idea of a new system allowing the USA to move troops closer to home or somehow ratchet back the number of bases we have is pretty naive. It's possible of course, but it would be the first time that ever happened with a new tech since the 1930s.
