It is true that, for all the freetard crowing about their precious "SSH", Microsoft is an industry leader in built-in remote access and administration tools. Many of them are so easy and intuitive that they can be configured an enabled without user intervention, or simply by visiting a website!
I'm not sure whether a terrorist organization whose thinking includes "Consider cost of updating process documents" would be a good or a bad thing.
On the minus side, it would suggest that they've been allowed to grow to enormous size under our noses. On the plus side, it would suggest a degree of institutional sclerosis so crippling as to render them doomed in the long term.
The logical assumption, as best I can tell, is that this will be showing up in Intel's Active Management Technology... in one form or another. Intel has been iterating this "AMT" for a while now, to provide various capabilities that things like PXE cannot, as a value-add to upsell corporate customers who would otherwise buy cheaper chips. There may also be some sort of blasphemous convergence with Intel's UEFI and hardware virtualization, to move AV right into the hardware, where the waste is harder to see and the competition finds it harder to dislodge...
You underestimate the potential for evil here: UEFI, baby.
Your A/V could be a runtime service baked right into your motherboard, hooking its dirty little fingers into assorted peripherals and memory spaces all below the OS level. Progress!
Worse than that. Virtually any cheapass phone allows you to set specific ring/vibration combinations for specific numbers. Set the trigger number to "vibrate", connect the vibration motor driver to the detonation stage, and set the default to "silent". Should take 25 seconds or so. Maybe a few minutes if VZ designed the interface...
Given the relatively closed state of the Xbox360(some known exploits for rather old firmwares; but not much available for the newest ones and aggressive banning of detected modified units from XBL by Microsoft) and the Xbox Live service, what are the avenues of cheating that would motivate them to use what are presumably statistical outlier detection models?
Are there individual game glitches that are considered to be "cheating" if used? Are there third-party controllers that have some equivalent of the good old "turbo" button(and some game that fails to control max fire rates, now that actual computing power is available)? Is there, in fact, a reasonable population of hacked xboxes running modified binaries that allow any of the classic PC gaming cheaters' tricks(see-through walls, etc.)? Do the requirements of low latency over domestic connections mean that some or most games leave themselves open to packet modification tricks?
Has somebody gone to the trouble of building a machine vision +input emulation system capable of delivering mathematically optimal play for certain games?
I know Microsoft bans modded hardware, and I know unmodded hardware won't execute unblessed binaries or talk to unblessed peripherals(unless, possibly, the correctly emulate the behavior of blessed ones), so why is "cheater" a distinct category from "banned"?
I would suspect that one factor in the death of adventure games as a genre(or at least their relegation to "smells funny" status) is that bad adventure games are absolutely fucking awful; but comparatively easy to make, while things like shooters, RPGs, and RTSes, tend to have a vast stretch of mediocrity to fall into.
Without tough-to-quantify-or-demonstrate-in-a-ten-minute-tech-demo-to-the-suits stuff like wit, good puzzle logic, and a dash of elegance, it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts(You need a stick for reasons that make no sense. Go to the 'forest' area and move your cursor from right to left, line by line, until it changes to the 'action cursor' icon when you have found the one stick in the forest that is actually an inventory item, rather than painted background.) and dialog trees that read like the bastard spawn of a choose-your-own-adventure book and the worst tech support call ever endured by man. Extra credit for puzzles that make up for their childish simplicity by tacking on utterly arbitrary requirements that can only be fulfilled with fanatical inventory management and the prescience of the Kwisatz Haderach. The technical requirements of making such a game are minimal, so the barrier to entry is low; but the result is utterly unplayable dreck.
By contrast, with the exception of the "baby's first 3d engine" horrors that no sane human pulls out of the bargain bin(Extreme Paintbrawl anyone?), the world is full of utterly generic; but playable enough, Doom Clone N+1s, illegitimate children of either C&C or Warcraft, and Diablo clones of assorted stripes. Most are not good; but the more action-oriented genres seem to have a much wider band of playable adequacy. This both makes them lower risk to produce, and makes the average endurability of those genres higher. Ergo, more are churned out.
It's like humor vs. generic summer splatterfests. Humor well done is excellent. Humor ill done isn't simply dull, it is downright painful(I find this odd; but it seems to be the case). Your basic run-and-gun action fest or hyped horror vehicle, on the other hand, has to work much harder to be downright painful, even if its odds of being excellent are basically nil. For whatever curious reason, there is just a broad band of "OK" in some genres; but much sharper division between "superb" and "painfully worthless" in others...
That means that I'll have to order my "Virtual Ford Explorer" prank transmitter from the same shady pacific rim electronics monger that I currently order my cellphone jammers from, right?
I wouldn't say "faith"; but I forsee fewer serious incidents with a system installed in a relatively small number of expensive and fairly heavily regulated objects, manned by well trained pilots, than I do with a system proposed for inclusion in common consumer vehicles, operated by any dumb bastard who manages to pass a road test(not at all a difficult task).
It would be interesting to know what, if any, ability aircraft have to reject as spurious signals that are coming from incongruous places(like ground-based pranksters) and whether or not it would be possible to "chase" aircraft into danger with false signals; but that will probably be less of an issue than something that will inevitably be available in any junkyard for $20 within a couple of years of deployment...
It will be completely impossible for either hacked Ford computers, or any other Wifi device operated by somebody who knows hat "MAC spoofing" means, to present inaccurate, deceptive, or otherwise unhelpful information to these Ford vehicles. I, for one, take comfort in that.
FFS, dudes, trusting the client in a life-critical application? Srsly? Srsly?
I suspect that there are two different things at work here:
Amazon already sells, through "EC2", fairly cheap linux VM instances(possibly windows now, as well). It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to set up a stock linux server VM as a spam system(or, if you aren't exactly a rocket surgeon yourself, have your instance rooted and turned into a spam system for you...)
Amazon has, beyond the boilerplate "if you do wicked things, that would be against our TOS and stuff", never promised any sort of filtering of what goes on in EC2 instances.
There new service, on the other hand, is specifically email delivery, and they do promise that they will avoid delivering spam. Since the service hasn't properly hit the wild yet, we don't really know if they are lying about it or not.
That is what I find most baffling about the Obama presidency:
The Democrats elected a republican, one who seems to have undergone something of a spinectomy at that, and the republicans are still convinced that the Democrats managed to elect a firebreathing radical socialist muslim who will be redistributing their white women at any moment now.
I just don't understand it. Is his being of the melanized persuasion really that much of a hang-up, or (more alarming) do they think that he is a radical socialist because the republican platform has continued drifting right until it settled on "Hire Haliburton to build a skull pyramid of our enemies that shall reach the heavens, in jesus' name!"
I would like to be able to report that this dip in spam correlates with a serious of brutal murders that authorities describe as "totally baffling and, y'know, really not worth the trouble of figuring out" rather than the much more mundane "slow increases in the effectiveness of filtering, along with migration to social networking and IM spam"...
Even the prosperity of some of the "hard" professional classes looks some mixture of threatened and artificial(obviously, a doctor or an EE is always going to make more than a member of the lumpen proletariat who has nothing but unskilled labor; but he may well end up doing well by the standards of a country with a considerably lower cost-of-living index).
Substantial amounts of the money paid for things like lawyers and accountants is because of what are essentially protectionist trade barriers: Legal systems differ between countries and(at least in some places, like the US, you need to pass a different exam and get a different certification in each one of the 50 states if you wish to practice in that state). Luckily our (mostly lawyer/ex-lawyer) politicians recognize the value of free trade when applied to other people, so steel is steel and protectionist tariffs are evil. Much of what lawyers do, especially boring bread-and-butter stuff, could basically be replaced by paralegals and text-parser scripts. That wouldn't touch the very high end; but were it not for legal requirements concerning the practice of law, a large number of lawyers could probably be replaced by expert systems parsing lexis-nexus and 22k/year liberal arts grads editing the results for good natural-language grammar.
Accountants are in a similar boat. The pay grade for "people who can do easy math" is pretty unexciting; but the intricate and locale specific regulatory knowledge has, for the moment, preserved them from being replaced by minimally trained spreadsheet jockies.
As with lawyers and accountants, Doctors are probably safe on the high end; but unless their customer base(ie. the former middle class) stops getting poorer, they'll find themselves either earning less or being supplanted by "almost as good and a lot cheaper" alternatives. An MRI at Mass General, with a Hopkins radiologist and a Harvard surgeon probably has better morbidity/mortality numbers; but, if you have to pay out of pocket, a trip to E-Z MRI, a machine vision diagnosis double-checked over the web by some South African radiologist, followed by a surgeon trained in India will beat the hell out of "nothing".
Engineers(except cvil and/or military/industrial) seem largely immune from technological obsolescence, barring serious AI advances; but much more vulnerable to offshoring.
You seem to be making a crucial error: you conflated "% of overall tax burden/person" with "% of overall tax burden/unit wealth".
In 2006, the top 1% made just over 21% of the total US income for that year. The top quintile, as a whole, made a hair over 60%.(and in general, top 1% incomes and top quintile incomes generally tend to be stock/capital gains heavy, and comparatively wage light, so things like social security withholdings and state sales taxes tend to be rather lower).
Unless your ideal taxation model is some kind of "head tax" where everybody pays the same just for showing up, the statement "they are being taxed approximately 80 times the rate as the rest of the americans" is simply nonsense. I would expect that tax rates would be modestly higher on people who actually have money; because taxing the bottom quintile or two, who basically operate at subsistence simply won't generate much money at all, but the "80 times higher" figure is ludicrous. Tax rate is a function of tax paid per dollar made, not taxes paid per person.
The pessimist might point out that this so called "hugely increased availability of information" has simply increased the amount of information available from "more than even the brightest human could assimilate in a two dozen lifetimes"(have any of our brave techno-futurists tried walking into a good-sized library sometime in the past few centuries?) to "some factors of 10 more than used to be available, much of this 'new information' being data-mining junk like credit card records and Wal-mart's inventory."
The news isn't so much that bright people are at a premium(society has always had its technocrats, going back to when "technocrat" meant "literate, probably related to some priesthood and keeping accounts for some king"); but that the bottom has absolutely fucking fallen out of the market for everybody else at approximately the same time that any legal, social, and cultural brakes on how much the people on the top can make have been removed.
There was a period(in retrospect, quite possibly a historical anomaly) where "blue-collar, single income" might have meant some hard physical labor and some risk; but it didn't mean that you had totally fallen off the bus compared to everyone else. People raised families, owned homes, that sort of thing. Thanks to a mixture of robots and offshoring, the number of such jobs has been sharply reduced(not to zero, at least during housing booms, skilled but 'blue collar' tradesmen often do ok or better); but job availability and pay across the highschool or less sector, as a whole have fallen like a rock and show no signs of ever recovering.
In fact, the fact that the ratio of high-school drop-out to BA/BS holder has only moved from 2.5 to 3 likely supports the pessimistic hypothesis. Despite the fact that the supply of good blue-collar jobs has been absolutely gutted, the ratio has only climbed slightly. That isn't "cognitive elite" money, that is "I'm white collar because I work in a cube, not a jiffy-lube" money. There is an elite in the US, possibly created in part by certain cognitive attributes; but it is so stratospherically above the dropout/BA/BS divide that it isn't even relevant.
In terms of net worth, the top quintile holds ~85%, the bottom four the remaining ~15%. If you restrict that just to "financial wealth"(ie. ignoring largely illiquid assets like houses and cars that are held mostly for use, and considering cash, financial instruments, and the like) the top 1% hold ~40%, the top quintile ~90% and the bottom four quintiles, together, less than 10%.
Quite probably. I was just whoring for "funny" mods(why one would do that, given that they are of no actual use is not clear; but, as Aristotle reports, Man is a Risible Animal...) using the largely false stereotype of europe as a nest of socialism.
I realize that your "labour" governments simply aren't, and haven't remotely been, since some time before the Thatcher administration(which may actually have been Ronald Reagan's most brilliant drag show of his entire acting career...)
It's just like we've been warning them for years: socialism leads to dependence on the government so severe that even anti-government protestors sit around on their asses waiting for an agent provocateur to provide them with a suitably illegal protest plan. Pathetic.
Here in the good old land of yankee ingenuity, we just outlaw whatever internal sedition our plucky can-do citizens manage on their own, and then beat the shit out of it. If the supply proves insufficient, we ensure full employment for Our Heroes by surveilling those terrifying pacifist quakers(they might put the "fist" in "pacificist" at any moment, you can't be too careful) and the occasional pothead(Morally depraved, and responsible for 85% of Cheeto shoplifting incidents...).
GP's simplistic drivel about "socialism" certainly does sound like what contemporary conservatism has reduced itself to; but there is an incongruity: empirically speaking, contemporary conservatism practically worships the power and authority of the state security apparatus. The people who trust the state to run prisons; but not schools. Who think that taxation is tyranny but torture is not.
Maybe he is a larval Randroid, or one of those people who thinks that "libertarian" means "authoritarian who hates paying taxes"...
Given the state of regulations that currently govern bank disclosures to the feds(ie. your banking records aren't much, if any, less transparent than your phone records, gotta catch them terrorists...), that scenario would almost certainly be counterproductive...
With a "national security letter" and some TLA dudes with guns, they probably could; but given the sort of IT systems banks use, that would probably net them a container trailer full of hard drives, in no particular order, each one containing fragments of a now-broken RAID volume in some ill-documented high end SAN vendor format. That would be a forensic nightmare and a half.
By contrast, obtaining the bank's cooperation under their existing legal powers(and, following the telco example, with a suitably generous "cost recovery" fee paid...), and getting a dump from the live systems, formatted halfway sensibly, would actually be useful before every accountholder is dead of old age...
Jet exhaust would certainly induce a good bit of that; but only behind a given aircraft(and, being substantially hotter than the surrounding atmosphere, I assume that it would rise reasonably swiftly, so aircraft #1's trail wouldn't provide much cover for aircraft #2, unless they were landing them alarmingly close together...)
For somebody lasing from a position in front of the aircraft, I assume that the answer would be "yes; but irrelevant". If you were trying to hit from behind, or if your beam path was intersected by another approach path, it might be a more vexing problem.
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It is true that, for all the freetard crowing about their precious "SSH", Microsoft is an industry leader in built-in remote access and administration tools. Many of them are so easy and intuitive that they can be configured an enabled without user intervention, or simply by visiting a website!
Maybe that is the secret reason why Intel is going to be fabbing FPGA's on their 20nm process for Achronix...
I'm not sure whether a terrorist organization whose thinking includes "Consider cost of updating process documents" would be a good or a bad thing.
On the minus side, it would suggest that they've been allowed to grow to enormous size under our noses. On the plus side, it would suggest a degree of institutional sclerosis so crippling as to render them doomed in the long term.
The logical assumption, as best I can tell, is that this will be showing up in Intel's Active Management Technology... in one form or another. Intel has been iterating this "AMT" for a while now, to provide various capabilities that things like PXE cannot, as a value-add to upsell corporate customers who would otherwise buy cheaper chips. There may also be some sort of blasphemous convergence with Intel's UEFI and hardware virtualization, to move AV right into the hardware, where the waste is harder to see and the competition finds it harder to dislodge...
You underestimate the potential for evil here: UEFI, baby.
Your A/V could be a runtime service baked right into your motherboard, hooking its dirty little fingers into assorted peripherals and memory spaces all below the OS level. Progress!
Worse than that. Virtually any cheapass phone allows you to set specific ring/vibration combinations for specific numbers. Set the trigger number to "vibrate", connect the vibration motor driver to the detonation stage, and set the default to "silent". Should take 25 seconds or so. Maybe a few minutes if VZ designed the interface...
Given the relatively closed state of the Xbox360(some known exploits for rather old firmwares; but not much available for the newest ones and aggressive banning of detected modified units from XBL by Microsoft) and the Xbox Live service, what are the avenues of cheating that would motivate them to use what are presumably statistical outlier detection models?
Are there individual game glitches that are considered to be "cheating" if used? Are there third-party controllers that have some equivalent of the good old "turbo" button(and some game that fails to control max fire rates, now that actual computing power is available)? Is there, in fact, a reasonable population of hacked xboxes running modified binaries that allow any of the classic PC gaming cheaters' tricks(see-through walls, etc.)? Do the requirements of low latency over domestic connections mean that some or most games leave themselves open to packet modification tricks?
Has somebody gone to the trouble of building a machine vision +input emulation system capable of delivering mathematically optimal play for certain games?
I know Microsoft bans modded hardware, and I know unmodded hardware won't execute unblessed binaries or talk to unblessed peripherals(unless, possibly, the correctly emulate the behavior of blessed ones), so why is "cheater" a distinct category from "banned"?
I would suspect that one factor in the death of adventure games as a genre(or at least their relegation to "smells funny" status) is that bad adventure games are absolutely fucking awful; but comparatively easy to make, while things like shooters, RPGs, and RTSes, tend to have a vast stretch of mediocrity to fall into.
Without tough-to-quantify-or-demonstrate-in-a-ten-minute-tech-demo-to-the-suits stuff like wit, good puzzle logic, and a dash of elegance, it is all to easy for an "adventure" title to fall into the morass of being a mixture of grindingly dull and unrealistic pixel hunts(You need a stick for reasons that make no sense. Go to the 'forest' area and move your cursor from right to left, line by line, until it changes to the 'action cursor' icon when you have found the one stick in the forest that is actually an inventory item, rather than painted background.) and dialog trees that read like the bastard spawn of a choose-your-own-adventure book and the worst tech support call ever endured by man. Extra credit for puzzles that make up for their childish simplicity by tacking on utterly arbitrary requirements that can only be fulfilled with fanatical inventory management and the prescience of the Kwisatz Haderach. The technical requirements of making such a game are minimal, so the barrier to entry is low; but the result is utterly unplayable dreck.
By contrast, with the exception of the "baby's first 3d engine" horrors that no sane human pulls out of the bargain bin(Extreme Paintbrawl anyone?), the world is full of utterly generic; but playable enough, Doom Clone N+1s, illegitimate children of either C&C or Warcraft, and Diablo clones of assorted stripes. Most are not good; but the more action-oriented genres seem to have a much wider band of playable adequacy. This both makes them lower risk to produce, and makes the average endurability of those genres higher. Ergo, more are churned out.
It's like humor vs. generic summer splatterfests. Humor well done is excellent. Humor ill done isn't simply dull, it is downright painful(I find this odd; but it seems to be the case). Your basic run-and-gun action fest or hyped horror vehicle, on the other hand, has to work much harder to be downright painful, even if its odds of being excellent are basically nil. For whatever curious reason, there is just a broad band of "OK" in some genres; but much sharper division between "superb" and "painfully worthless" in others...
That means that I'll have to order my "Virtual Ford Explorer" prank transmitter from the same shady pacific rim electronics monger that I currently order my cellphone jammers from, right?
I wouldn't say "faith"; but I forsee fewer serious incidents with a system installed in a relatively small number of expensive and fairly heavily regulated objects, manned by well trained pilots, than I do with a system proposed for inclusion in common consumer vehicles, operated by any dumb bastard who manages to pass a road test(not at all a difficult task).
It would be interesting to know what, if any, ability aircraft have to reject as spurious signals that are coming from incongruous places(like ground-based pranksters) and whether or not it would be possible to "chase" aircraft into danger with false signals; but that will probably be less of an issue than something that will inevitably be available in any junkyard for $20 within a couple of years of deployment...
Harder-core still, of course, would be designing and implanting it yourself. While quite rare, DIY abdominal surgery is possible and documented....
It will be completely impossible for either hacked Ford computers, or any other Wifi device operated by somebody who knows hat "MAC spoofing" means, to present inaccurate, deceptive, or otherwise unhelpful information to these Ford vehicles. I, for one, take comfort in that.
FFS, dudes, trusting the client in a life-critical application? Srsly? Srsly?
I suspect that there are two different things at work here:
Amazon already sells, through "EC2", fairly cheap linux VM instances(possibly windows now, as well). It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to set up a stock linux server VM as a spam system(or, if you aren't exactly a rocket surgeon yourself, have your instance rooted and turned into a spam system for you...)
Amazon has, beyond the boilerplate "if you do wicked things, that would be against our TOS and stuff", never promised any sort of filtering of what goes on in EC2 instances.
There new service, on the other hand, is specifically email delivery, and they do promise that they will avoid delivering spam. Since the service hasn't properly hit the wild yet, we don't really know if they are lying about it or not.
That is what I find most baffling about the Obama presidency: The Democrats elected a republican, one who seems to have undergone something of a spinectomy at that, and the republicans are still convinced that the Democrats managed to elect a firebreathing radical socialist muslim who will be redistributing their white women at any moment now.
I just don't understand it. Is his being of the melanized persuasion really that much of a hang-up, or (more alarming) do they think that he is a radical socialist because the republican platform has continued drifting right until it settled on "Hire Haliburton to build a skull pyramid of our enemies that shall reach the heavens, in jesus' name!"
I would like to be able to report that this dip in spam correlates with a serious of brutal murders that authorities describe as "totally baffling and, y'know, really not worth the trouble of figuring out" rather than the much more mundane "slow increases in the effectiveness of filtering, along with migration to social networking and IM spam"...
Even the prosperity of some of the "hard" professional classes looks some mixture of threatened and artificial(obviously, a doctor or an EE is always going to make more than a member of the lumpen proletariat who has nothing but unskilled labor; but he may well end up doing well by the standards of a country with a considerably lower cost-of-living index).
Substantial amounts of the money paid for things like lawyers and accountants is because of what are essentially protectionist trade barriers: Legal systems differ between countries and(at least in some places, like the US, you need to pass a different exam and get a different certification in each one of the 50 states if you wish to practice in that state). Luckily our (mostly lawyer/ex-lawyer) politicians recognize the value of free trade when applied to other people, so steel is steel and protectionist tariffs are evil. Much of what lawyers do, especially boring bread-and-butter stuff, could basically be replaced by paralegals and text-parser scripts. That wouldn't touch the very high end; but were it not for legal requirements concerning the practice of law, a large number of lawyers could probably be replaced by expert systems parsing lexis-nexus and 22k/year liberal arts grads editing the results for good natural-language grammar.
Accountants are in a similar boat. The pay grade for "people who can do easy math" is pretty unexciting; but the intricate and locale specific regulatory knowledge has, for the moment, preserved them from being replaced by minimally trained spreadsheet jockies.
As with lawyers and accountants, Doctors are probably safe on the high end; but unless their customer base(ie. the former middle class) stops getting poorer, they'll find themselves either earning less or being supplanted by "almost as good and a lot cheaper" alternatives. An MRI at Mass General, with a Hopkins radiologist and a Harvard surgeon probably has better morbidity/mortality numbers; but, if you have to pay out of pocket, a trip to E-Z MRI, a machine vision diagnosis double-checked over the web by some South African radiologist, followed by a surgeon trained in India will beat the hell out of "nothing".
Engineers(except cvil and/or military/industrial) seem largely immune from technological obsolescence, barring serious AI advances; but much more vulnerable to offshoring.
You seem to be making a crucial error: you conflated "% of overall tax burden/person" with "% of overall tax burden/unit wealth".
In 2006, the top 1% made just over 21% of the total US income for that year. The top quintile, as a whole, made a hair over 60%.(and in general, top 1% incomes and top quintile incomes generally tend to be stock/capital gains heavy, and comparatively wage light, so things like social security withholdings and state sales taxes tend to be rather lower). Unless your ideal taxation model is some kind of "head tax" where everybody pays the same just for showing up, the statement "they are being taxed approximately 80 times the rate as the rest of the americans" is simply nonsense. I would expect that tax rates would be modestly higher on people who actually have money; because taxing the bottom quintile or two, who basically operate at subsistence simply won't generate much money at all, but the "80 times higher" figure is ludicrous. Tax rate is a function of tax paid per dollar made, not taxes paid per person.
The pessimist might point out that this so called "hugely increased availability of information" has simply increased the amount of information available from "more than even the brightest human could assimilate in a two dozen lifetimes"(have any of our brave techno-futurists tried walking into a good-sized library sometime in the past few centuries?) to "some factors of 10 more than used to be available, much of this 'new information' being data-mining junk like credit card records and Wal-mart's inventory."
The news isn't so much that bright people are at a premium(society has always had its technocrats, going back to when "technocrat" meant "literate, probably related to some priesthood and keeping accounts for some king"); but that the bottom has absolutely fucking fallen out of the market for everybody else at approximately the same time that any legal, social, and cultural brakes on how much the people on the top can make have been removed.
There was a period(in retrospect, quite possibly a historical anomaly) where "blue-collar, single income" might have meant some hard physical labor and some risk; but it didn't mean that you had totally fallen off the bus compared to everyone else. People raised families, owned homes, that sort of thing. Thanks to a mixture of robots and offshoring, the number of such jobs has been sharply reduced(not to zero, at least during housing booms, skilled but 'blue collar' tradesmen often do ok or better); but job availability and pay across the highschool or less sector, as a whole have fallen like a rock and show no signs of ever recovering.
In fact, the fact that the ratio of high-school drop-out to BA/BS holder has only moved from 2.5 to 3 likely supports the pessimistic hypothesis. Despite the fact that the supply of good blue-collar jobs has been absolutely gutted, the ratio has only climbed slightly. That isn't "cognitive elite" money, that is "I'm white collar because I work in a cube, not a jiffy-lube" money. There is an elite in the US, possibly created in part by certain cognitive attributes; but it is so stratospherically above the dropout/BA/BS divide that it isn't even relevant.
In terms of net worth, the top quintile holds ~85%, the bottom four the remaining ~15%. If you restrict that just to "financial wealth"(ie. ignoring largely illiquid assets like houses and cars that are held mostly for use, and considering cash, financial instruments, and the like) the top 1% hold ~40%, the top quintile ~90% and the bottom four quintiles, together, less than 10%.
It seems only fair to ask whoever just had to take the shiny toy out for a spin whether it was worth it for Serbia?
Quite probably. I was just whoring for "funny" mods(why one would do that, given that they are of no actual use is not clear; but, as Aristotle reports, Man is a Risible Animal...) using the largely false stereotype of europe as a nest of socialism.
I realize that your "labour" governments simply aren't, and haven't remotely been, since some time before the Thatcher administration(which may actually have been Ronald Reagan's most brilliant drag show of his entire acting career...)
It's just like we've been warning them for years: socialism leads to dependence on the government so severe that even anti-government protestors sit around on their asses waiting for an agent provocateur to provide them with a suitably illegal protest plan. Pathetic.
Here in the good old land of yankee ingenuity, we just outlaw whatever internal sedition our plucky can-do citizens manage on their own, and then beat the shit out of it. If the supply proves insufficient, we ensure full employment for Our Heroes by surveilling those terrifying pacifist quakers(they might put the "fist" in "pacificist" at any moment, you can't be too careful) and the occasional pothead(Morally depraved, and responsible for 85% of Cheeto shoplifting incidents...).
GP's simplistic drivel about "socialism" certainly does sound like what contemporary conservatism has reduced itself to; but there is an incongruity: empirically speaking, contemporary conservatism practically worships the power and authority of the state security apparatus. The people who trust the state to run prisons; but not schools. Who think that taxation is tyranny but torture is not.
Maybe he is a larval Randroid, or one of those people who thinks that "libertarian" means "authoritarian who hates paying taxes"...
Given the state of regulations that currently govern bank disclosures to the feds(ie. your banking records aren't much, if any, less transparent than your phone records, gotta catch them terrorists...), that scenario would almost certainly be counterproductive...
With a "national security letter" and some TLA dudes with guns, they probably could; but given the sort of IT systems banks use, that would probably net them a container trailer full of hard drives, in no particular order, each one containing fragments of a now-broken RAID volume in some ill-documented high end SAN vendor format. That would be a forensic nightmare and a half.
By contrast, obtaining the bank's cooperation under their existing legal powers(and, following the telco example, with a suitably generous "cost recovery" fee paid...), and getting a dump from the live systems, formatted halfway sensibly, would actually be useful before every accountholder is dead of old age...
Hyperbolic, possibly; but the law is fairly broad and the bar fairly low.
Jet exhaust would certainly induce a good bit of that; but only behind a given aircraft(and, being substantially hotter than the surrounding atmosphere, I assume that it would rise reasonably swiftly, so aircraft #1's trail wouldn't provide much cover for aircraft #2, unless they were landing them alarmingly close together...)
For somebody lasing from a position in front of the aircraft, I assume that the answer would be "yes; but irrelevant". If you were trying to hit from behind, or if your beam path was intersected by another approach path, it might be a more vexing problem.