Tootfinder

The US military has always had a massive global advantage against enemies by having bases all over the world. There are bases in every NATO country. This would appear to be a powerful threat to anyone willing to oppose American hegemon, and under normal conditions it would be.
But a lot of those kids serving on those bases joined, not because they love America but, because they needed a ticket out of poverty. They joined for the education, for the money, maybe a bit for the adventure, but, more than anything, to escape the ghetto or podunk backwater that trapped them. Under normal times, this is the best deal they could expect. Maybe they risk their lives, usually they sit around being bored for a few years, and they get to come out with respect and paid college.
But what they are being offered is normal in most of the countries they're stationed in. Free healthcare, cheap or free education, is just what citizens in a lot of countries have come to expect. If the US attacked a NATO country, how many would snap up citizenship if they were given a chance to defect? Bonus points for taking some hardware with you, I'm sure.
But there are some who love their country. There are some patriotic Americans on those bases. Some of them joined specifically to protect the US from all enemies, foreign *and* domestic. Given a chance to fulfill that oath or violate international law, what happens?
There are a good number of former military folks too who now are unsafe in the countries they served, who would do just about anything for citizenship in any EU country and almost any NATO ally. Some of those folks know things they swore an oath to never share, but the country they swore an oath to has betrayed them. Today there's no value in leaking those secrets, but in a war between the US and NATO allies things would be different. Some of those former military folks still believe in their oath, and know exactly who the real enemy is. What happens when there's a real threat of war, when they can use their knowledge to fulfill that oath to protect the US against those domestic threats?
There are a bunch of civilian tech workers who have become targets of the regime. Some of them had clearance, or know about the skeletons in the closet. They know about critical infrastructure, classified systems, all sorts of things that would be extremely valuable to an opponent. But the opponents of the US have always been a frightening *other*, never familiar societies these folks look up to, have visited, have thought about moving to, are trying to escape to.
All I'm saying here is that invading Venezuela and kidnapping the president has a very different calculus than does attacking Greenland. I don't know if Trump or his people are able to understand that, but if he and his folks aren't then I hope European leaders are. But more than that, I hope it never comes down to finding out.
But perhaps we should all think about what we would do to make sure things ended quickly if American leadership ever made such an incredible mistake.

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

Arthur Blank addresses regime change, aims for 'leadership' that gets Falcons to 'next level' https://www.nfl.com/news/arthur-blank-addresses-regime-change-aims-for-leadership-that-gets-falcons-to-next-level

It's funny how "AI" tools are simulteanously marketed as "agents" that can run fully in the background and do stuff but whenever they do something bad it's the user at fault for not supervising the software that doesn't work.
Even when it’s directly used and the user has the chance to review everything—it’s extremely dangerous, especially at tasks it is doing fine like 95% of the time and/or when the bad things are only subtly wrong.
Imagine other tools being like this, like a steering wheel that turns the car 95 out of a 100 times. 2% of the time it steers into the other direction. 3% of the time it steers 5x as much as normally.

"No doubt about it: Climate change made Hurricane Melissa way worse"
#Climate #ClimateChange
htt…

No doubt about it: Climate change made Hurricane Melissa way worse
An analysis of the storm found “all aspects of this event were amplified by climate change, and that we'll see more of the same.”

Water main broke up the street, so decided to read at the 1970s-themed bar that was thankfully empty. Free bathroom (for the cost of drinks) and no mask necessary (for the absence of humans).

soc_net_comms: Networks with group metadata
Snapshots of LiveJournal, Friendster, Orkut, and YouTube online social networks, as well as DBLP and Amazon. Node metadata represents a post hoc definition of a 'community' that a node belongs to, derived from topical labels of the node or interest-based 'groups' that a node links to.
This network has 317080 nodes and 1049866 edges.
Tags: Online, Social, Collaboration, Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted, Metada…

Man, I bet we’re all relieved today that Obama shut ICE down the first chance he got. And then Biden… remember when he shut it down a second time just for good measure? (And while busy funding and arming a whole friggin’ genocide in Palestine, what a legend!) *Phew!* Imagine what could have happened if the Democrats had just kept going with business as usual.
#theRatchetEffect

Alright, the internet is all too much right now. I'm gonna take a break for a bit and work on some projects. I have some organizing to do and some bugs to find.
The horrible things in the world don't change what we have to do. Our work is and has always been the same. They may make it easier to get other folks on board, they may make it more obvious that we were right all along, but they don't change our job.
We will do our work of building community, supporting each other, and creating the world we want to see. It will take as long as it takes to do. None of the news changes any of that. So I'm gonna take my break and hopefully come back after I've gotten some of that shit done.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Remember that when you start to feel guilty about taking a breath.

FPS is the biggest available channel that I'm aware of to funnel Academi into ICE/CBP enforcement operations. The point of using FPS to support ICE agents is that FPS is stocked full of troops from EriK Prince's private army (now called "Academi" but formerly called "Blackwater"). This means that carrying out ethnic cleansing can dump money directly into the pockets of America's version of the Wagner Group (side from, of course GEO Group).
The Erik Prince angle also means that there can be an alternative chain of command that exists outside of official channels. ICE is already bad enough, but similar people have worked as mercenaries for a long time. Having an established chain of command over armed occupiers, one based entirely on economic incentives, one that can't be legally monitored or audited, one that's completely outside of the government, should be especially worrying.
I don't believe we've ever seen a clear explanation of who was kidnaping people off the streets, but I know that Academi had a contract (I believe with FPS) in Portland at the time. We also don't know who is on the ground in US cities right now, because they're wearing masks.
The bit reason J6 didn't go as planned is that Erik Prince wasn't behind it. Now there are troops with experience occupying American cities who can be called directly via Erik when Trump wants to make sure he doesn't lose again. And Erik won't back out at the last minute this time, because he's already seen that there will be no consequences for participating in a coup... if the time comes.
#USPol