Yeah, they need to up their efficiency with more AI. 😄

Your framing is bizarre to me, as it was never meant as a directed/individualistic comment. The presence of outliers doesn’t really impact the point I had been making, which is what I had to re-iterate once someone declared themself an outlier and pretended like that’d somehow be material.

Like if you make a post saying “People are struggling to afford groceries these days”, and someone responds back saying “I can afford groceries”, it doesn’t really change the validity of that first statement. It’s just that the person responding back doesn’t understand the context or something.

Congrats. It seems the rhetorical device is lost on you, and you’re not inclined to view the statement more broadly from the perspective of the majority. The rhetorical device isn’t meant to be applied to a single individual case, but rather interpreted as a broad concept highlighting the situation of what people would envision for a ‘regular’ citizen. From that vantage, you’d be looking at a majority who simply try to make ends meet and who’s focus is largely on treading water in a system increasingly aimed at crushing the agency/freedom of its people. Most can’t afford to be altruistic, and there isn’t enough revenue to support larger volumes of people working in organisations aimed at helping impoverished areas.

But further, to put your situation slightly differently: it sounds like you were provided with an opportunity to work for the armed forces and for a company that built clinics and schools, because others in dutch society produced what was needed to maintain dutch lifestyles, and the excess of their labour allowed you to pursue more altruistic goals. It’s the same general concept as the rich being able to give to charities / social causes because they’ve fucked the poor and created social issues to become rich, but abstracted a bit to social values. And the practical reality that there are some people working in those countries towards worthwhile ends, isn’t really material to the broader situation: just like the fact that some rich people are philanthropists, doesn’t realistically change the amount of damage done by the wealthiest demographic collecting/hoarding the wealth that some of them trickle back via charity.

How willing have you been to go and put your life on the line to stop these atrocities? If you’re not willing to, why should others?

If none of the individuals in a democratic country are eager to go die to prevent the atrocities, then why would you think a democratic country would take action to force individuals to go die to try and prevent a genocide?

And in this particular case, international trade with Sudan is at like 3% of their GDP – they don’t really trade with anyone, so its not like democratic countries can be all “smarten up, or else no more [x]!”

The UN at one point in the past had a decent peace keeping force function, that’d go and assist such regions. But the UN has basically been kneecapped by both authoritarian non-democratic countries having veto powers, and by the USA overtly defunding all its programs as of late.

And the US is now participating eagerly in war crimes / crimes against humanity – they’re the ‘supposed’ leader of the democratic west, but they actively encourage genocides like in Israel. The people of the USA voted for it. They’re ‘democratically’ in favour of encouraging genocides. Your opinion in the broader democratic environment, if you’re American, is in the minority. And part of living in a democracy is accepting the will of the majority, which happens to be in favour of genocides.

The upholding of international law always depended on the existence of a n international rules based order with some sort of enforcement authority, which generally boiled down to the potential use of force by the USA and/or ‘coalition’ forces when the USA asked other western powers to help make it seem like there was a consensus to the action.

The international experts saying they want to see the war stopped, are not prepared to risk themselves to stop that war. Nor are any other countries in the world, because the USA is so disproportionately militaristic.

Hell, Spain raised concerns, and the Diapered Dictator Leader of the American people, declared all trade cut.

The US, internally even, is being subjected to the same stuff. Minnesota is basically being “made an example of” via brutal federal actions, and all the other blue states are stayin pretty quiet / aren’t stoppin it. Israel/USA stuff in Iran is basically the same playbook on an international stage.

Most western leaders don’t want to be next.

these people act entirely on impulse, with only the immediate satisfaction of their instant gratification as their objective.

So they’re Americans, a product of America’s instant gratification consumer culture. Shocking!

I hope Carney builds up Canada’s Spain trade relationship more. It honestly seems like a pretty cool country. Middle power countries should just use Trumps various outbursts to excise the states if need be, and to support each other. Someone else noted that the US primary exports are fossil fuels and machinery – Canada’s already exporting a bunch of machinery that way, and clearly has some fossil fuels available.

Lol you make it sound like there’s anyone in America who’d actually stand up and do anything of that nature. They’re all too fat and placated by dorritos to peel themselves off their couches and protest, let alone take any more significant actions. A third of them couldn’t even be bothered to vote last time around, when the dictator who’d tried to violently overthrow the American government got back into power and started all this shit again.

You’re still living in some sort of American exceptionalism fantasy. The country is an authoritarian dictatorship at this point, with a paramilitary that has more funding than most foreign armies, and a mandate to terrorize/pacify American dissent.

Realistically? Trump drops a nuke. MAGAs and America cheer, because “Nuke make big boom! MURICA STRONG!! USA USA USA!!”. American/North American media whitewashes it as acceptable and good, just like all the zionist shit is whitewashed as acceptable and good. Americas moderates shrug and open a new bag of potato chips, waiting for aliens to show up on their Fox news feeds. Left wing Americans send thoughts and prayers if they’re too poor to get out, or if theyre rich, they immigrate (like Angelina Jolie) to get away from a country they now view as inhumane. The democrats come out supporting the nuking too, as theyre entirely captured by Israel and AIPAC stuff. Russia then bombs Ukraine, and maybe some EU countries – America spins that as proof that they were weak and were failed states moving towards “civilizational collapse”, something they’ve already laid the groundwork for claiming, and redoubles its efforts to annex Canada and Greenland, and to subdue/castrate any upstarts in south America, likely with increased threats of bombing them all with nukes. China takes Taiwan, cause if Nukes are free to use, there’s nothing really stopping them from doing so given general proximity – you can’t easily “park” a naval carrier group anywhere at sea to feign a projection of power, if your enemies are fine nuking the entire area to oblivion. That’s one reason the states is so against Iran getting nukes I imagine – it limits the deterrent influence of their more conventional military assets. Sorta like how the USA suddenly got real quiet about North Korea and the “DOOOM!!!” that’d occur if they got nukes… once NK actually got nukes (and the doom didn’t occur! surprise! but trust us, Israel says Iran’s different!).

Directly nuking a country that has nuclear capabilities would likely still be ‘off the table’ generally, as it’d trigger potential retaliation. But the rest get screwed. The USA has already walked away from its commitment to things like NATO, and has openly said they’re fine letting Russia ‘do whatever the hell they want’ with European countries.

The above string of events sounds far fetched. But I find it far more believable than to think that Americans will actually do something about the shit their administration/country is pushing.

Yeah, but this breach is specifically about KYC, about financial industry stuff. The company that got porked, was the company the banks used for their KYC stuff.

KYC is typically a due diligence process tied to regulated financial industry participants – the restaurant example has a much different function. Banks and FIs have much broader retention (and disclosure) obligations.

Here, let’s put it slightly differently. I’ll reference Canadian regulations/processes more, as those are the ones I’m most familiar with. If you’re a bank, you’re required to flag suspicious transactions related to the customer – and in order to know when those transactions are suspicious, you need some way of reviewing it within the context of the customer. You may even have an obligation to second guess / question / try and advise the customer ‘not’ to make a transaction, based on knowing your customer.

The most basic example of that, is where Credit Cards will decline payments / request a call if you try and make a purchase in a totally abnormal location – like you “know your customer” lives in Toronto, but suddenly see them spending money in Mexico? Or if they called you before they took a trip to mexico, that’d also go into a KYC type file to let people know to expect those sorts of charges and let em get processed. That’s tied to KYC.

The media will often run stories about seniors getting scammed, with the general message being “WHY DIDNT BANKS DO MORE TO PROTECT?”. Well, that’s KYC too. You gotta ‘know’ your senior members, and their spending habits to some extent, to find those outliers. You also need to be familiar with them enough to know whether its “normal” for them to come by and take out cash, and in what quantities and for what purpose, cause seniors will sometimes ‘show up’ with a person pressuring them to take out cash to ‘pay a bill’ (scammms galore!). All part of KYC due diligence.

Or the somewhat obvious elephant in the room – if you have a “personal” account member, who keeps receiving etransfers to his “jeevacation@gmail.com” account for some reason, you gotta look into it a bit and sort out what all those payments are related to, cause it isn’t a business account. And if you see anything suspicious, it gets reported to the authorities, where, most likely, Trump shits himself and Americans ignore the crimes.

People want surveillance options. One of the highest/most obvious features required, unsurprisingly, is the ability to see your cameras on your smart phone – which generally means you need a Smartphone App + a centralised server/system connecting the different ends. The alternative being that end users would likely need static IP addresses / Dynamic DNS setups to have a Smartphone app point “directly” to their exposed CCTV ports – which I don’t imagine regular consumers are keen on, likely why basically no such options seem to exist in the retail space (afaik - if there are widely used brands i dont know about, by all means clue me in).

Options that are fully local/closed/under user control, are almost impossible to find. This isn’t so much a consumer-specific problem, from my perspective, at this point – there aren’t enough options for consumers to choose differently. It’s sorta like how you’re generally ‘stuck’ with US-tethered Smartphones. It’s not so much a ‘choice’ that consumers get to make, as it is that these big businesses have effective monopolies and consumers are stuck.

KYC isn’t evil. It’s literally the operational piece that says stuff like “If someone named Vladimir Putin tries to open a bank account with you, you should know if he’s THAT putin or not, especially as it may get your business in serious trouble related to gov sanctions etc”. The government, quite literally, sends auditors to Banks and Credit Unions every 2-3 years to make sure you do this sort of due diligence.

The issue with KYC is that it’s farmed out to third parties that focus on scale and cutting costs. It’s in the same general space as something like Credit Scores – Banks/Credit Unions don’t maintain their own credit scores for people so much, as they just buy that score information from Equifax / Transunion etc.

Really, what I imagine people should be pushing for instead of this piecemeal whining, is something closer to what Estonia has for its citizens. A highly integrated government-based portal that allows citizens to do things like Register a New Small business in 15 minutes, and to see which organisations have access to their gov ID info. From what I understand, citizens basically get given PINs as part of their gov IDs, which they can disclose to banks/businesses, who can subsequently access basic required read-only details about that person via the gov portal. So your bank needs to know who you are? No problem, you let them know your pin when you setup the account – and the banks system is then able to pull just the basic info from your gov account to meet the banks operational needs / regulatory obligations whether you’re there in person or not. And as a citizen, if you want to check your privacy disclosures to third parties, you just log in to the gov site, and see a list of which businesses have access to your data – and I imagine you’d get the option to cancel their access if you wanted to (so when you close an account at a business, you pop in to the gov site and also clip their ongoing access). From what I gather, that sites a one stop shop for all gov stuff, so it’s also where you go for tax stuff, drivers lics, the works. Makes it a LOT simpler for citizens, as you don’t need to sort out what esoteric stupid sub site / domain you need to visit to see if you qualify for a rebate or whatever – so it seems like a big improvement from a user experience side.

ALL THAT SAID, that shift would put more onus on the consumer in some ways, as they’d need to log in to a gov site etc – like it’s bad enough trying to explain MFA to old people, imagine trying to make this shift! You’d also need a government that was willing to actually do stuff for the people – I think Estonia only went that way, as an attempt to shield themselves from massive attacks from Russia. They want their gov fully functioning in the cloud, including elections etc, so that even if they end up like Ukraine, they can still “function” remotely. Consumers are a big issue for anything security related too, as practically no one changes banks / FIs based on security – it’s almost entirely rate oriented for mortgage holders. Tell a consumer they can get a 0.2% better rate by going with the bank that doesn’t fuss security, they’ll take it. Try and market your bank/FI as being more security conscious, it won’t generally draw in new members based on that alone.

Like, again using Canada as an example, we’ve had a year of the US antagonizing us and threatening economic ruin / annexation. Lots of Canadians are keen not to buy American products as a result. Almost all of Canadas banks/CUs use US partners/outsourcing within their stack: places like Vancity Credit Union, for example, are using Intellect Design’s product for their online banking, which is a partner owned by an India parent company (with little/no presence in Canada), which hosts its stuff on Microsoft’s cloud. Most Credit Unions in the country are likely going to go the same way in the next couple years – even though it’s a huge security risk, and highly likely that both India and the USA will gain access to all your data, let alone sketchy third party’s like India’s fraud centers. There are a couple Credit Unions in Canada that actually maintain stuff (almost entirely) in Canada. But that’s not enough to entice people to use those organisations, so they’re all dying out / merging as a result of a lack of members (and regulatory overreach / decrees).

Tax records are required to be kept for 7 years in North America (generally, as far as I know - def in Canada). So you order something online from a business, they have a business need to keep your data on hand for 7 years in case an auditor / tax person comes asking about it. Be that someone auditing the business, or someone auditing a customer. That’s a requirement from the government.

I’ve seen customers ask for tax stuff going back up to 20 years from a business. In those cases, if there’s demand for data going back that far for whatever reason, the business can internally say “We have a business reason to retain data longer” because people ask for it – there’s demand. So they can justify to auditors/legal sorts retaining that information indefinitely, based on user demands/requests.

In some cases when I’ve seen those ancient requests, it’s also tied to legal disputes from customers – eg. Trying to prove in a divorce that such and such was bought by party A in 2005 for X amount. In some cases, there’re class actions that go outside the 7 year window, and require data from further back to sort out – for example there’s a case in Canada currently where a financial lender is paying back ~$2000 per person that took a loan from them from 2016-2021 (so ~10 years of personal data needs to’ve been kept, to verify early claimants). Part of needing to keep data so long, is that the court cases are often so drawn out that the 7 year window would make some crime/wrong-doing much more difficult to prosecute due to a lack of evidence. I know of one class action lawsuit in the Financial Industry that’s been ongoing since the 90s, and still isn’t fully resolved – most of the potential class action recipients are deceased at this point, and the only people profiting are lawyers, but still. Lawyers are a part of the problem, and a reason why data is often being held longer and longer. Honestly, Lawyers are also terrible at securing their data --they tend to rely on paper-controls to prevent their unsecured data from getting used, rather than actual hardening. Like there was a guy who spent a few years in Colombia or something, his personal laptop being used for all sorts of nefarious stuff, and when he came back to Canada and the border people took his laptop, it was totally unencrypted/unsecured. They guy just argued it was his “legal work” laptop and everything on it is confidential and can’t be used in court.

Idk. I think your approach is overly simplistic for the issue. There’s a lot of “stuff” related to corporate data retention policies and methods, and I don’t really see much nuance in what you’re proposing. Hell, if they only kept your data till you got your item, youd NEVER be allowed to get a refund, cause they’d have no record of you purchasing the item.

Well, both China and the US tech billionaires are feverishly working towards having a personal army of unthinking killing machines that they can deploy unilaterally to a region to massacre a population without any of that annoying “soldiers refusing to kill children”, or “people back home objecting to risking soldier’s lives” shit.

And while what was demonstrated likely didnt include much sensory perception/reaction, it still demonstrated a marked improvement over last years models – similar story when you see their more human-looking things with those weird flesh/muscle wraps that’re like straight outta terminator. I’m also not totally sure about the perception stuff myself, as a few times in the performance it looked to me like the robots responded / adjusted to variances in their partners moves – like a kid who did a flip a bit too low over a sword, and the robot adjusts a bit lower at the last second to avoid a collision.

I don’t think I’ve seen any similar such videos from American companies – like I recall one video from boston dynamics where they had a robot doing a simple obstacle course, and some pre-defined basic acrobatics/dance moves. I haven’t seen anything like what China seems to have available in the (admittedly very high end) consumer market space coming out of western countries lately, though I suppose that could be a marketing bubble/blitz issue.

In the end it prolly doesn’t matter – whether it’s china or the US tech bros, the tech will be massively abused one way or another. Like based on the speed of advancement, you could imagine them having their automaton armies in production by 2030 easy. Then it’s just ‘whoever has more manufacturing power for killer humanoid robots wins’ (paired with ‘who has control of the production stack for those killer robots’, hence the push to grab more land by many major powers). I wouldn’t even be surprised if the ‘elites’ were explicitly aiming for this to occur, to suddenly and drastically reduce the population of the world thinking itll help buy time related to climate damage. Wipe out people in third world countries (see israel, cuba, looks like iran soon), wipe out the poor, thinking itll lower things like gas emissions etc – cutting programs like USAID also fits with this general goal, as it clearly has a negative impact on life expectancy rates “in target countries”, while also freeing up resources for a global superpower to execute things like land grabs while also cracking down on their own citizens aggressively. The tariffs too, trying to re-shore manufacturing and advanced chip fabs, would almost be a pre-requisite, as deploying a killer robots army somewhere would ‘likely’ cause a backlash and supplier cutoffs, if they’re still originating from more democratic states (or ones without killer robot armies of their own). Starlink’s basically a global network allowing control of robot armies dropped anywhere in the world – if countries can’t block it, they can’t easily interrupt robot control functions.

Ok a chunk of that ‘may’ be paranoia, but it’s not implausible in my view. So… yeah, yes I think we should all be a bit worried / concerned. Not that I think there’s much we can do about it.

Makes sense. US build up of troops in the middle east in preparation for war with Iran. Or not war, but “special operations” or whatever BS term they use these days.

That’ll eat up most headlines, so other atrocities can likely sneak by with less opposition.

To be fair, the dems also want, and use, authoritarian levers these days. Also, historically, they’ve been very ineffectual when it comes to pushing through progressive items – see the USA as the only advanced economy without public healthcare as an easy example, or them being the only country without basic gun laws.

Heck, one of the very few legit points Trump made in the one weaksauce debate he had with Biden, was along the lines of “If tariffs are so bad, why’d you guys leave all the tariffs in place from my first term?”. If there’s an election, and if they win, I doubt the dems will really do all that much.

Idk. To me it’s starting to look increasingly like there are irreconcilable differences between what the majority seem to want, and what a small rich minority wants. There are maga dads shooting their daughters, in maga states, over political shit, and they get let off by their maga jury. You’ve got red state ICE troops deploying to blue state cities explicitly to terrorize the population – those same troops are shooting people in the streets with zero accountability, protected by a group of people who are increasingly looking like ultra rich pedophiles of a very depraved sort. A group of individuals who are basically Americas ruling class, with likely ties between their pedophile island crimes, to Israel and Russia, and the USA’s unquestioning support of the atrocities being committed on the other side of the world.

It’s really difficult to picture what you’d need to do as a politician, to ‘make this right’ for the people in blue states/cities. If the people demand accountability for all the shit that’s gone on, it’ll enrage the right further. If you don’t hold them accountable, well everyone’s seen the result of not holding Trump accountable for the Jan 6 insurrection – it just gets worse and worse. They’re already at a point where they’re shooting dem civilians in the streets with impunity, and with ‘righteous fury’ automatically labelling these people terrorists/enemies of the states. Even using AI to alter photos of protesters to feed the propaganda machine.

Really feels like there’s increasingly a chance for a civil war in the usa.

Out of the loop? trans woman. So verbiage may vary.

Good for them.

Though I really doubt fascists actually care about women’s sports all that much in general. And if they do it isn’t “GASP Wokies won!!!”, it’s more “GASP who let them out of the kitchen!!”.

America isn’t a country of laws anymore. The supreme court rubber stamps anything the administration wants to do, and the administration “declines requests from the judiciary”. You’ve got administration officials that don’t know what Habeas Corpus means, suspending Habeas Corpus. You’ve got a military openly/brazenly committing war crimes on the international scene (blowing up unverified “narco boats”/civilians). You’ve got a paramilitary gestapo-like force quite literally shooting citizens in the streets, your own government aiming to terrorize its people – which’s the whole point of the violent Ice operations targeting blue states.

But yeah, sure, Google and the big tech bros who have been supporting Trump’s actions throughout all of this will totally draw the line at disclosing data.