"...difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media...the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies."
Hope standing by and allowing social media to violently fuck over the concept of privacy while granting those mega-corps Too Big To Fail status was worth it for all those who are now struggling in this "inhospitable" environment...
"the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees"...
Gee Comey, ever consider the fact that tech companies don't see this because the government chose to keep that CLASSIFIED?!?
Not to mention pointing out the fact that the tech companies kind of woke the hell up with regards to default encryption when Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 what the US Government does when encryption is NOT the default standard. How ironic our OWN Intel community caused this shift in default behavior...
There aren't enough users who give a shit about their privacy no matter what company gets dragged in front of Congress next. Edward Snowden certainly didn't impact change regarding privacy and social media use. Neither will any privacy-crushing revelations as more and more companies are scrutinized. 1 in 10 Americans deleted their Facebook accounts in the last month? Fucking please. There are more dead people on Facebook than that so-called major shift in social media use.
All varieties of pepper are nutrient-rich, and the heat will boost the metabolism a bit helping control weight, provide pain relief, help manage diabetes, and directly fights prostate cancer.
I fully agree.
Don't give up on peppers just because overdoing it can cause harm.
Just don't overdo it.
Pepper mad scientists overdid it about 2 million scoville units ago. It was nice back when the habanero was king, and people still enjoyed the taste of a good pepper.
Now the pepper world has morphed into the food equivalent of Jackass.
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
If an autonomous solution starts to malfunction causing it to start drifting off the road, it would be nice to have some kind of manual override. Perhaps you can stop assuming that every emergency that happens in an autonomous car is going to require faster-than-human reflexes to do anything to avoid disaster. The next step in driverless cars with no one behind the steering wheel is the removal of said wheel, along with the requirement to license drivers. Greed will ensure to use the excuse of "less deaths than humans" to dismiss the inevitable deaths due to malfunctions, but a loved one being killed by a software glitch caused by premature adoption will be hard to handle, especially when you'll sign any legal right away the moment you step foot into any autonomous vehicle.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
Other than those profiting from pushing autonomous solutions to market as fast as greed will possibly allow, I haven't heard of *any* adult armed with common sense showing that this is a good idea.
Deploying it in the most populated state in the nation is merely icing on the Cake of Grand Stupidity.
The problem is that ransomware is extremely rare. If the trash isn't taken out for two weeks, everyone notices. If backups aren't done for two years noone notices until the day they all wake up without a job.
Ransomware is "rare"?! Hardly. Ransomware has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. It has been a significant threat (if not THE significant threat) for the last two years in business. The trash not being taken out doesn't result in decades of data loss for an organization who is unprepared, along with legal issues, fines, and bankruptcy.
I stand by my statements regarding ignorant business owners who don't value IT.
"...It is a big step forward for autonomous car developers, especially as the industry faces heightened scrutiny over safety concerns."
Scrutiny? Don't assume for one fucking second this change has fuck-all with validating how safe driverless cars are, especially with no backup driver. This is Greed N. Corruption pushing forward with legislation that best supports maximizing profits at any cost.
We completely fail to understand the business and therefore canâ(TM)t provide adequate information for business leaders to make good decisions...Chances are we could make the business solution better and more affordable if we looked at the end goal and presented an alternative.
We completely fail to understand the business? What bullshit.
Forget about the FUD tactics of selling decent Security for a minute, if an IT manager does NOT know how to gather the requirements (a.k.a the "end goal"), present multiple solutions (a.k.a. the "alternatives"), and then create a proper SLA (which includes budget for adequate support agreements and staffing up front to perpetually support a service), then they have no place in IT or business.
And yes, I've been in IT long enough to understand those are still challenges we face today, but it's still not an excuse for doing the common sense legwork. IT doesn't need to understand "business" beyond maintaining the systems and services that keep a business alive, which is why you don't find CPAs or MBAs in IT. If management is too stupid and ignorant to understand the value of IT for their business and help define the very SLAs that keep IT systems functioning properly, then they tend to get what they deserve.
And it's not hard to define an SLA. Walk over to the server and turn it off. Then ask management how long they can do without it. After they stop jumping around like monkeys, you'll get an answer to create a budget with.
So, employees wouldn't dream of taking their own garbage out, taking turns cleaning the bathrooms at work, or working in an environment that wasn't equipped with a well-functioning heat and A/C system, so maintenance and cleaning staff is fully justified in their minds.
Have you seen how much the cleaning staff is paid? In the country where I live, it has all been outsourced and the people make barely above minimum legal and the company employing them avoids all extra costs (no one gets hired working more than 40% of the legal work week (40 hours), because at 50% the company has to pay for vacation, for instance). It's greed, as others said above. No one wants to pay more than barely minimum for anything. And in my case, it shows in the results. The toilets are dirty, the offices aren't clean and so on...
I was primarily addressing the parents point that the average person feels that IT is something that "provides no value". No matter how cheap your company tries to be with hiring cleaning staff, they STILL do not categorize it as something that "provides no value", or is an optional expense. Neither is a maintenance department.
As I said before, let the average person flounder when ransomware hits. After all, I'm sure they're only carrying around ALL of their personal and/or work data on a single local hard drive because doing regular backups is just another pointless activity that the worthless IT staff told them to do...
Why does this pattern of underinvestment in and under-appreciation of IT continue?
Because people don't like the stinky nerds, and don't care about "nerd things".
The reference is hilarious, but the irony of this mentality in the real world is a shitload of people are employed by some of the richest nerds in the universe, who started their multi-billion dollar mega-corps doing "nerd things".
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it.
Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
So, employees wouldn't dream of taking their own garbage out, taking turns cleaning the bathrooms at work, or working in an environment that wasn't equipped with a well-functioning heat and A/C system, so maintenance and cleaning staff is fully justified in their minds.
But the trained professionals who maintain the services that feed their social media and internet addiction, along with maintaining the systems that tend to help generate the revenue that feeds paychecks is somehow something that "provides no value"?
If this kind of ignorant mentality exists in an organization, then the fucking hiring problem isn't in IT. I say let the "average person" flounder like a fish out of water the next time the internet goes down, or ransomware hits their system.
...Even still there were almost 1 million "new" applications.
It's more likely there were about 1,000 new applications, along with another 999,000 pieces of useless crap. Quantity over quality still rules king when it comes to app stores.
What is the use of these numbers? Is there any meaningful conclusion you can take from this? Should I switch to Android because it has more apps in the store. Or should I switch to iOS because there is less old/crap in the store?
The overwhelming percentage of apps are pointless crap anyway, so these metrics are about as useful as knowing how many emails are caught by your average SPAM filter, regardless of which store you use.
"they are bending to the pressure of parents who want to be able to reach their kids."...during school hours. If they need to reach their kids during school THEN THEY SHOULD CALL THE FUCKING OFFICE, the way it has always been.
Learn to laugh this off and don't worry. When entitled parents raise dumb ass kids who hold the digitally-retarded attention span of a rabid squirrel, they'll reap their helicopter parenting rewards in spades by warehousing those "kids" well into their 20s and 30s.
They will, eventually, wise up and move their operations to a lower cost of living area and save gobs of cash from salaries alone.
If companies were too stupid to realize this 20 years ago, then they're too stupid to realize it now or anytime in the future. VPNs and remote work has been a viable concept for well over a decade now, so companies don't even have the lame excuse of having to set up operations where the "talent" is.
Seems pretty damn clear who fucked up and who should be held accountable here.
Then please share for those of us less enlightened. I mean in your quote you already mentioned at least two separate people, but since you've done the investigation I'm sure you can also tell us about:
- How you've reviewed the engineering drawings and design to ensure that it was designed correctly.
- How you've reviewed construction to ensure that construction was as per design.
- How you've reviewed the composition of materials.
- How you've reviewed that pre-tensioning was completed correctly.
- How you've reviewed that there was no damage during movement.
You're clearly a structural engineer with detailed knowledge of the shape and effect of the crack on the bridge too I see, so likely you've reviewed the fact that the previous engineers were wrong when they looked at the cracks, otherwise you wouldn't have quoted that part about an "ignored" voice mail that wasn't so much ignored as it was discussed in committee for an hour. But you knew that already right?
While we're at it, why not tell us about the process. Apparently you know the exact failure so what was it? Was the tensioning done incorrectly? Was it equipment which failed? Was the hydraulic system calibrated properly? I mean it's amazing that you know all this, last I heard people weren't even sure if they were tensioning or detensioning.
But please enlighten us on all the above since you know the cause of it. If there's anything there you don't know then how are you certain that you actually found the cause and who's at fault? By the way you should become a super incident investigator since you've solved in mere days what normally takes months to identify. Kudos to you!
There is no doubt an investigation to be performed, but where you are wrong is that this will not take mere "months" to investigate. It will be dragged out by insurance companies for years, which reinforces one of my main points here. NOT having the sense to clear traffic while performing an "inherently risky" operation is the most obvious fuck-up, which Common F. Sense would hope there is already a regulation on the books that can be cited to find fault quickly and efficiently. Reading about an unused bridge failing is a hell of a lot easier to swallow than reading about lives lost.
And my "ignored" comment was referring to a voice mail that was left by an engineer two days prior to the collapse to report structural cracking, but was not picked up until the day after the collapse, as reported by Florida DOT. Had more than one organization reviewed the damage surveyed prior to the collapse, tragedy may have been avoided. The fact that the engineer who found and ultimately dismissed the damage works for the very company who built the bridge tends to bring a question of bias into that safety decision as well.
Regarding ultimately finding fault, that will likely never be found due to the insane amount of variables you have already cited. That finger pointing will likely go on for the next decade, all the way down to the hardness of the water used mixing concrete. That said, the cause of the collapse is a bit more obvious when they were in the middle of tweaking structural integrity on an already damaged structure when it failed.
Surveillance Capitalism isn't the real problem. What feeds it, is. Bruce ignorantly assumes that people still give a shit about privacy. Professional Narcissist and Attention Whore are now paid professions, and oversharing is considered a social mantra. The masses worry about privacy about as much as a porn star worries about having sex in front of a camera.
In order to enact change, you have to get people to start giving a shit about privacy again, which would likely mean no more free internet services, including social media. With GenY/Z, good luck with that shit.
"...they're also calling it "the sort of baffling accident that makes structural engineers break out in sweats."
Uh, how exactly is this some kind of "baffling" mystery here? Instead of summarizing theories, let's review the facts:
"The investigative team has confirmed that workers were adjusting tension on the two tensioning rods located in the diagonal member at the north end of the span when the bridge collapsed...They were working on the second rod when the span failed and collapsed."
Seems pretty damn clear to me as to the cause of the collapse. Let's review the fuck-ups that lead to disaster and lives lost:
"...a[n ignored] voice message about cracks in the structure that were deemed superficial...Post-tensioning that modifies the stresses in a structure is inherently risky and should be performed "in the absence of traffic,"...The roadway was not closed while this work was being performed."
Seems pretty damn clear who fucked up and who should be held accountable here. Of course, this also happened in the United States, which means insurance companies are going to drag out pointless "investigations" for the next 2-3 years in order to keep millions in their coffers for as long as immorally possible.
Facebook employees in an uproar? What business did they think they were in?
Zuck may sugar coat what they are doing as "connecting people" but its basically an image/comment sharing site. Not some grandiose save the world mission.
Get real.
An image/sharing site? Facebook is now arguably the worlds largest human tracking database. With the amount of data they hold, someone can easily profile a human and learn a LOT about them, to the level of prediction, impersonation, and especially mass influence.
And when I say *someone*, that includes damn near any government on the planet.
That's not exactly the same as running a fucking personal blog where you share grandmas recipes and pictures of your favorite shoes.
If we're gonna "get real", then let's stop bullshitting about what power Facebook actually wields. If their database was held by any government and you caught stealing it, you would be facing life in prison or worse.
Too little, too late. Get your ass over to Capitol Hill Zuck, and try to stuff the sausage back into the casing. This goose is fully cooked. People are wising up to FB shenanigans and its days are numbered. I wouldn't buy stock in this company at half its current level, it's going to be a media circus.
Wising up? What a load of shit. The only thing more pathetic than your delusions here is the assumption that people still give a shit about data privacy. If they did, Facebook and all of the other social media platforms that feed mass narcissism wouldn't exist.
Their days are numbered? If Facebook lost a million users a month from now on, it would only take 200 fucking years to empty the customer pool.
"Citi said that in addition to the policy for new clients, it is starting talks with current clients on their practices and if they do not adopt changes the bank will help “transition their business away from Citi.”
From a financial standpoint this would be called shooting themselves in the foot.
Cracks me up when talking about an anti-gun policy.
Slashdot Mirror
"...difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media...the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies."
Hope standing by and allowing social media to violently fuck over the concept of privacy while granting those mega-corps Too Big To Fail status was worth it for all those who are now struggling in this "inhospitable" environment...
I was hoping the Patent "Death Squad" actually hunted down patent trolls...
Certainly would make for a nice reality show, wouldn't it...
"the leaders of the tech companies don't see the darkness the FBI sees"...
Gee Comey, ever consider the fact that tech companies don't see this because the government chose to keep that CLASSIFIED?!?
Not to mention pointing out the fact that the tech companies kind of woke the hell up with regards to default encryption when Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 what the US Government does when encryption is NOT the default standard. How ironic our OWN Intel community caused this shift in default behavior...
Slowly the frog boils
although not so slowly lately
Very Orwellian.
Believe me, it's still a slow boil.
There aren't enough users who give a shit about their privacy no matter what company gets dragged in front of Congress next. Edward Snowden certainly didn't impact change regarding privacy and social media use. Neither will any privacy-crushing revelations as more and more companies are scrutinized. 1 in 10 Americans deleted their Facebook accounts in the last month? Fucking please. There are more dead people on Facebook than that so-called major shift in social media use.
All varieties of pepper are nutrient-rich, and the heat will boost the metabolism a bit helping control weight, provide pain relief, help manage diabetes, and directly fights prostate cancer.
I fully agree.
Don't give up on peppers just because overdoing it can cause harm.
Just don't overdo it.
Pepper mad scientists overdid it about 2 million scoville units ago. It was nice back when the habanero was king, and people still enjoyed the taste of a good pepper.
Now the pepper world has morphed into the food equivalent of Jackass.
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
If an autonomous solution starts to malfunction causing it to start drifting off the road, it would be nice to have some kind of manual override. Perhaps you can stop assuming that every emergency that happens in an autonomous car is going to require faster-than-human reflexes to do anything to avoid disaster. The next step in driverless cars with no one behind the steering wheel is the removal of said wheel, along with the requirement to license drivers. Greed will ensure to use the excuse of "less deaths than humans" to dismiss the inevitable deaths due to malfunctions, but a loved one being killed by a software glitch caused by premature adoption will be hard to handle, especially when you'll sign any legal right away the moment you step foot into any autonomous vehicle.
Same with Whatsapp and everything else they own.
The question may as well be rhetorical.
Exactly.
And there are ZERO fucks given for the idiot Facebook users suddenly crying about privacy and yet continue to use their services.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
Other than those profiting from pushing autonomous solutions to market as fast as greed will possibly allow, I haven't heard of *any* adult armed with common sense showing that this is a good idea.
Deploying it in the most populated state in the nation is merely icing on the Cake of Grand Stupidity.
The problem is that ransomware is extremely rare. If the trash isn't taken out for two weeks, everyone notices. If backups aren't done for two years noone notices until the day they all wake up without a job.
Ransomware is "rare"?! Hardly. Ransomware has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. It has been a significant threat (if not THE significant threat) for the last two years in business. The trash not being taken out doesn't result in decades of data loss for an organization who is unprepared, along with legal issues, fines, and bankruptcy.
I stand by my statements regarding ignorant business owners who don't value IT.
"...It is a big step forward for autonomous car developers, especially as the industry faces heightened scrutiny over safety concerns."
Scrutiny? Don't assume for one fucking second this change has fuck-all with validating how safe driverless cars are, especially with no backup driver. This is Greed N. Corruption pushing forward with legislation that best supports maximizing profits at any cost.
We completely fail to understand the business and therefore canâ(TM)t provide adequate information for business leaders to make good decisions...Chances are we could make the business solution better and more affordable if we looked at the end goal and presented an alternative.
We completely fail to understand the business? What bullshit.
Forget about the FUD tactics of selling decent Security for a minute, if an IT manager does NOT know how to gather the requirements (a.k.a the "end goal"), present multiple solutions (a.k.a. the "alternatives"), and then create a proper SLA (which includes budget for adequate support agreements and staffing up front to perpetually support a service), then they have no place in IT or business.
And yes, I've been in IT long enough to understand those are still challenges we face today, but it's still not an excuse for doing the common sense legwork. IT doesn't need to understand "business" beyond maintaining the systems and services that keep a business alive, which is why you don't find CPAs or MBAs in IT. If management is too stupid and ignorant to understand the value of IT for their business and help define the very SLAs that keep IT systems functioning properly, then they tend to get what they deserve.
And it's not hard to define an SLA. Walk over to the server and turn it off. Then ask management how long they can do without it. After they stop jumping around like monkeys, you'll get an answer to create a budget with.
So, employees wouldn't dream of taking their own garbage out, taking turns cleaning the bathrooms at work, or working in an environment that wasn't equipped with a well-functioning heat and A/C system, so maintenance and cleaning staff is fully justified in their minds.
Have you seen how much the cleaning staff is paid? In the country where I live, it has all been outsourced and the people make barely above minimum legal and the company employing them avoids all extra costs (no one gets hired working more than 40% of the legal work week (40 hours), because at 50% the company has to pay for vacation, for instance). It's greed, as others said above. No one wants to pay more than barely minimum for anything. And in my case, it shows in the results. The toilets are dirty, the offices aren't clean and so on...
I was primarily addressing the parents point that the average person feels that IT is something that "provides no value". No matter how cheap your company tries to be with hiring cleaning staff, they STILL do not categorize it as something that "provides no value", or is an optional expense. Neither is a maintenance department.
As I said before, let the average person flounder when ransomware hits. After all, I'm sure they're only carrying around ALL of their personal and/or work data on a single local hard drive because doing regular backups is just another pointless activity that the worthless IT staff told them to do...
Because people don't like the stinky nerds, and don't care about "nerd things".
The reference is hilarious, but the irony of this mentality in the real world is a shitload of people are employed by some of the richest nerds in the universe, who started their multi-billion dollar mega-corps doing "nerd things".
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it.
Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
So, employees wouldn't dream of taking their own garbage out, taking turns cleaning the bathrooms at work, or working in an environment that wasn't equipped with a well-functioning heat and A/C system, so maintenance and cleaning staff is fully justified in their minds.
But the trained professionals who maintain the services that feed their social media and internet addiction, along with maintaining the systems that tend to help generate the revenue that feeds paychecks is somehow something that "provides no value"?
If this kind of ignorant mentality exists in an organization, then the fucking hiring problem isn't in IT. I say let the "average person" flounder like a fish out of water the next time the internet goes down, or ransomware hits their system.
...Even still there were almost 1 million "new" applications.
It's more likely there were about 1,000 new applications, along with another 999,000 pieces of useless crap. Quantity over quality still rules king when it comes to app stores.
What is the use of these numbers? Is there any meaningful conclusion you can take from this? Should I switch to Android because it has more apps in the store. Or should I switch to iOS because there is less old/crap in the store?
The overwhelming percentage of apps are pointless crap anyway, so these metrics are about as useful as knowing how many emails are caught by your average SPAM filter, regardless of which store you use.
"they are bending to the pressure of parents who want to be able to reach their kids." ...during school hours. If they need to reach their kids during school THEN THEY SHOULD CALL THE FUCKING OFFICE, the way it has always been.
Learn to laugh this off and don't worry. When entitled parents raise dumb ass kids who hold the digitally-retarded attention span of a rabid squirrel, they'll reap their helicopter parenting rewards in spades by warehousing those "kids" well into their 20s and 30s.
They will, eventually, wise up and move their operations to a lower cost of living area and save gobs of cash from salaries alone.
If companies were too stupid to realize this 20 years ago, then they're too stupid to realize it now or anytime in the future. VPNs and remote work has been a viable concept for well over a decade now, so companies don't even have the lame excuse of having to set up operations where the "talent" is.
Nothing will change.
Check the spec - perhaps it was by design or not called out to ignore empty entries?
A null/blank input taken as a wildcard is certainly not a feature.
Even labeling that as a mere bug is putting it mildly. More like gargantuan fuck-up.
Seems pretty damn clear who fucked up and who should be held accountable here.
Then please share for those of us less enlightened. I mean in your quote you already mentioned at least two separate people, but since you've done the investigation I'm sure you can also tell us about: - How you've reviewed the engineering drawings and design to ensure that it was designed correctly. - How you've reviewed construction to ensure that construction was as per design. - How you've reviewed the composition of materials. - How you've reviewed that pre-tensioning was completed correctly. - How you've reviewed that there was no damage during movement. You're clearly a structural engineer with detailed knowledge of the shape and effect of the crack on the bridge too I see, so likely you've reviewed the fact that the previous engineers were wrong when they looked at the cracks, otherwise you wouldn't have quoted that part about an "ignored" voice mail that wasn't so much ignored as it was discussed in committee for an hour. But you knew that already right?
While we're at it, why not tell us about the process. Apparently you know the exact failure so what was it? Was the tensioning done incorrectly? Was it equipment which failed? Was the hydraulic system calibrated properly? I mean it's amazing that you know all this, last I heard people weren't even sure if they were tensioning or detensioning.
But please enlighten us on all the above since you know the cause of it. If there's anything there you don't know then how are you certain that you actually found the cause and who's at fault? By the way you should become a super incident investigator since you've solved in mere days what normally takes months to identify. Kudos to you!
There is no doubt an investigation to be performed, but where you are wrong is that this will not take mere "months" to investigate. It will be dragged out by insurance companies for years, which reinforces one of my main points here. NOT having the sense to clear traffic while performing an "inherently risky" operation is the most obvious fuck-up, which Common F. Sense would hope there is already a regulation on the books that can be cited to find fault quickly and efficiently. Reading about an unused bridge failing is a hell of a lot easier to swallow than reading about lives lost.
And my "ignored" comment was referring to a voice mail that was left by an engineer two days prior to the collapse to report structural cracking, but was not picked up until the day after the collapse, as reported by Florida DOT. Had more than one organization reviewed the damage surveyed prior to the collapse, tragedy may have been avoided. The fact that the engineer who found and ultimately dismissed the damage works for the very company who built the bridge tends to bring a question of bias into that safety decision as well.
Regarding ultimately finding fault, that will likely never be found due to the insane amount of variables you have already cited. That finger pointing will likely go on for the next decade, all the way down to the hardness of the water used mixing concrete. That said, the cause of the collapse is a bit more obvious when they were in the middle of tweaking structural integrity on an already damaged structure when it failed.
Surveillance Capitalism isn't the real problem. What feeds it, is. Bruce ignorantly assumes that people still give a shit about privacy. Professional Narcissist and Attention Whore are now paid professions, and oversharing is considered a social mantra. The masses worry about privacy about as much as a porn star worries about having sex in front of a camera.
In order to enact change, you have to get people to start giving a shit about privacy again, which would likely mean no more free internet services, including social media. With GenY/Z, good luck with that shit.
"...they're also calling it "the sort of baffling accident that makes structural engineers break out in sweats."
Uh, how exactly is this some kind of "baffling" mystery here? Instead of summarizing theories, let's review the facts:
"The investigative team has confirmed that workers were adjusting tension on the two tensioning rods located in the diagonal member at the north end of the span when the bridge collapsed...They were working on the second rod when the span failed and collapsed."
Seems pretty damn clear to me as to the cause of the collapse. Let's review the fuck-ups that lead to disaster and lives lost:
"...a[n ignored] voice message about cracks in the structure that were deemed superficial...Post-tensioning that modifies the stresses in a structure is inherently risky and should be performed "in the absence of traffic,"...The roadway was not closed while this work was being performed."
Seems pretty damn clear who fucked up and who should be held accountable here. Of course, this also happened in the United States, which means insurance companies are going to drag out pointless "investigations" for the next 2-3 years in order to keep millions in their coffers for as long as immorally possible.
Facebook employees in an uproar? What business did they think they were in?
Zuck may sugar coat what they are doing as "connecting people" but its basically an image/comment sharing site. Not some grandiose save the world mission.
Get real.
An image/sharing site? Facebook is now arguably the worlds largest human tracking database. With the amount of data they hold, someone can easily profile a human and learn a LOT about them, to the level of prediction, impersonation, and especially mass influence.
And when I say *someone*, that includes damn near any government on the planet.
That's not exactly the same as running a fucking personal blog where you share grandmas recipes and pictures of your favorite shoes.
If we're gonna "get real", then let's stop bullshitting about what power Facebook actually wields. If their database was held by any government and you caught stealing it, you would be facing life in prison or worse.
Too little, too late. Get your ass over to Capitol Hill Zuck, and try to stuff the sausage back into the casing. This goose is fully cooked. People are wising up to FB shenanigans and its days are numbered. I wouldn't buy stock in this company at half its current level, it's going to be a media circus.
Wising up? What a load of shit. The only thing more pathetic than your delusions here is the assumption that people still give a shit about data privacy. If they did, Facebook and all of the other social media platforms that feed mass narcissism wouldn't exist.
Their days are numbered? If Facebook lost a million users a month from now on, it would only take 200 fucking years to empty the customer pool.
"Citi said that in addition to the policy for new clients, it is starting talks with current clients on their practices and if they do not adopt changes the bank will help “transition their business away from Citi.”
From a financial standpoint this would be called shooting themselves in the foot.
Cracks me up when talking about an anti-gun policy.