Jesus. That's almost as dark as the reality of things.

Heh, very true. It just messes up the first impression which is where the clothing jokes have the best impact. Never as fun if people take time to get to know you before getting the joke your appearance made.

Nope, the president doesn't have the legal authority to give that order. He has the legal authority to order them to consider the question, which is the process that's going on.

My favorite type of incoherent gibberish is the type that might be trying to talk about a terrible idea.

Politicians keep talking about building pipelines from places that have water to places that don't.
Maybe the answer is actually that California isn't the best place for agriculture once you get past the easy access to migrate labor, and they should price industrial and agricultural water usage accordingly.

The whole tactical-style-for-not-tactical-thing makes me rage. Not because it exists, but because it's been picked up by the wrong demographic.

That sort of thing should belong to the realm of the ironic, and be worn by the person who has a bad joke to go with it.

Tactical baby carrier should be for the fun dad who uses it to make jokes about how you otherwise might notice the baby, and not the fragile guy who needs a shield to defend his masculinity in the face of raising his children.

It's like so much of these things started as a gag, and then got picked up by people who aren't in on the joke.

A lot of that information can be weirdly public. Looking up property records often comes with data about utility bills and taxes, and their payment statuses.

The RSV vaccine is even being used in the wild! Certain high risk demographics can get it during RSV season. And not rare high risk either, women beyond a certain point in pregnancy and older people.

Yeah, and it's not like you want the information out there, it's just that in my opinion it's not something I would pay money for. Having the authority to make the request doesn't mean that the party on the other end is obligated to comply, or in some cases even legally permitted to.

I've used Google's service where they send you an email to review results if they find something, and my Google results for my incredibly distinctive name are basically only professional resources that I kinda want to be findable.

Honestly? It's not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they'll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
Beyond that, there's some information that you just fundamentally can't make private and no service can get taken down.
Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.

Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn't make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.

Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn't going to listen to a request to take it down either. They're just going to send you spam messages.

The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who's focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.

I have never felt so old.

Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren't home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by "far away" I mean roughly 50 miles.

It's not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
If you know an address, it's pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

As an example, here's the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it's really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you'll find something pretty fast.

Depends on the vendor for the specifics. In general, they don't protect against an attacker who has gained persistent privileged access to the machine, only against theft.
Since the key either can't leave the tpm or is useless without it (some tpms have one key that it can never return, and will generate a new key and return it encrypted with it's internal key. This means you get protection but don't need to worry about storage on the chip), the attacker needs to remain undetected on the server as long as they want to use it, which is difficult for anyone less sophisticated than an advanced persistent threat.

The Apple system, to its credit, does a degree of user and application validation to use the keys. Generally good for security, but it makes it so if you want to share a key between users you probably won't be using the secure enclave.

Most of the trust checks end up being the tpm proving itself to the remote service that's checking the service. For example, when you use your phones biometrics to log into a website, part of that handshake is the tpm on the phone proving that it's made by a company to a spec validated by the standards to be secure in the way it's claiming.

Package signing is used to make sure you only get packages from sources you trust.
Every Linux distro does it and it's why if you add a new source for packages you get asked to accept a key signature.

For a long time, the keys used for signing were just files on disk, and you protected them by protecting the server they were on, but they were technically able to be stolen and used to sign malicious packages.

Some advanced in chip design and cost reductions later, we now have what is often called a "secure enclave", "trusted platform module", or a general provider for a non-exportable key.
It's a little chip that holds or manages a cryptographic key such that it can't (or is exceptionally difficult) to get the signing key off the chip or extract it, making it nearly impossible to steal the key without actually physically stealing the server, which is much easier to prevent by putting it in a room with doors, and impossible to do without detection, making a forged package vastly less likely.

There are services that exist that provide the infrastructure needed to do this, but they cost money and it takes time and money to build it into your system in a way that's reliable and doesn't lock you to a vendor if you ever need to switch for whatever reason.

So I believe this is valve picking up the bill to move archs package infrastructure security up to the top tier.
It was fine before, but that upgrade is expensive for a volunteer and donation based project and cheap for a high profile company that might legitimately be worried about their use of arch on physical hardware increasing the threat interest.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they're using one of the languages that uses := for assignment. :P

I can see the rationale, but I disagree.

I think it's difficult to make a good assessment because every situation involving multiple legitimate armed factions that's come about has had a lot of other Context around it that makes it hard to know if what you're seeing is because of the factions, or because of the context.

That being said, the vast majority of cases I can think that involve multiple armed factions seem to devolve less into rational actors minimizing conflict to reduce cost, and more into rational actors executing violence to maintain control of resources or impose conformance with their beliefs.
Violence is often very profitable. It gives you control over resources you didn't have, and compels people to cooperate with your wishes.

they also couldn't legitimize the violence

In the absence of a monopoly on violence, all of it is just as legitimate. Each group sees their use of force to further or protect their interests as legitimate and others as illegitimate. This can manifest as blood fueds, vendettas, communal violence, or the myriad forms of organized crime.

I totally agree that the leviathan, which is a much cooler word for the entity with a violence monopoly, has no reason to offer overmuch quality to their violence. The leviathan only wants to use force to perpetuate their monopoly on force.
I'd argue that the violence required to maintain the status quo is less than what competing factions would exert trying to establish themselves.

While there are plenty of states doing horrible things, there are plenty that are relatively benign, and even the horrible ones are, on the historical scale, less common and more mild.
The most docile areas seem to me to be ones with a single legitimate violent actor, and pro-social systems in place to reduce the need for cooercion.

I don't think we can ever entirely get rid of the state, since at some point people will form a structure to manage or, at least document, the society they've built, and a state by any other name is still a state.
But we can wither it away if we make sure to replace it with non-coercoercive social replacements instead of leaving a vacuum like the "starve the beast" folks want.

As the smallest nit, the states monopoly on violence isn't to be the sole doer of violence, but to be the sole arbiter on the legitimacy of violence.
In a perfect system, you fighting back against the rogue cop is legitimate because the state legitimizes your use of force.
Practically, we usually only see that legitimazation happen with stand your ground laws and castle doctrine, and less police issues because the police are "special", but that's aside from the lofty theory.

Cool. That's a coherent political philosophy, you just don't normally run into people arguing for more legitimate use of violence.

Personally, multiple armed entities sounds like the worst aspects of government without the redeeming aspects.

I'm the breed of anarchist more concerned with involuntary power hierarchy than specific forms of said dynamic, like class. Reducing the number of groups who can coerce others into doing stuff isn't aligned with more legitimate armed factions.
I voted for my sherrif, so I'm more okay with him pointing a gun a me than your trade union, whom I didn't vote for. It's not wholly voluntary because I didn't get to vote for "disarm the sheriff and make the fire fighters the principle law enforcement group", so it's far from perfect, but at least I know who's holding the gun.

You say that living in a world where the government at least actively controls what can be sold as a roadworthy vehicle, and unsafe cars can be taken off the street.
"I don't want government doing what they're currently doing because I never see any instances of the problem they're trying to prevent".
"We don't need vaccines because I never see any of the diseases doctors are always wanting to vaccinate for".

We used to sell cars where the steering wheel was solid steel and a low speed collision caved your face in. Industry only started to sell safer cars when they were forced to do so.

There's being pissy about government abuse, and then there's being upset about safety standards.

Are you advocating for multiple, competing armed groups in the US?

Generally, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is considered a cornerstone of "government".

It depends on where you are, the cop, and a lot of other context. It's one of those cases where America is more like 50 different little countries than one big country.

My state police force has a policy to only chase if there's an active danger to public safety.
That doesn't apply to the sheriff's of the 83 counties in the state, or the approximately 500 other police agencies, although many counties mirror the policies of the state police.

Weirdly, I generally trust the state police more than any of the others. They tend to be significantly better trained and more focused on public safety than making money for the county.
I've only been pulled over by one once and he just wanted to make sure I was okay, which was fair considering my car was failing and it sounded like a shitty old lawnmower that was also broken.

In general our police are powerfully undertrained, underpaid, over funded, improperly screened and with a radically unhealthy attitude on their relationship with non-police. We also lack enough uniformity for that assessment to be universal.

The image literally name drops Stalin and then provides a report from 30 years later as a gotcha.

It's almost like... There was mass starvation under Stalin, and then it got better.

No chase policies aren't uncommon. They're not universal but they're not uncommon.

Given the rarity of chases, the danger they pose, and the lack of benefit in most cases, the guidance is usually to not bother unless there's reason to believe there's something like a kidnapping or murder.

Or the cop will fire blindly through the back windshield of the car. Luck of the draw really.