fraud

Sabotage. Property made unusable. Passengers were literally stranded in the middle of a journey.

It’s worse. They are saying that the EU copyright law, as written, only allows decompiling/reverse engineering to “fix bugs”. A bug fix would involve a software patch of some sorts. But the security researchers did not have time to write a patch yet, what they did is tell the customer “Yep, it’s fucked. Your vendor put in a killswitch to make the trains brick themselves.” So that does tell them where the problem is, but it is not a bona fide bug fix from the Bugfix region of France, and therefore illegal.

Newag [train maker] claims that the Dragon Sector [whitehat hacker] team endangered passengers’ safety by modifying the software without proper experience. But Newag then turns right around and claims that Dragon Sector did not modify the software at all. They point out that EU law only allows reverse engineering of software in order to fix bugs. And if Dragon Sector did not actually modify the software, it cannot have fixed any bugs, in which case their reverse-engineering must be illegal.

There has never been a law that someone selling something must offer the same price to everyone. Outside of some government regulation, like banning discrimination based on a few specific protected groups under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, government-set energy prices on state-granted monopoly electrical grids, annual rent increase percentage caps, etc. merchants have always been free to set any price on any product or to any customer.

Ah! Guess my memories are a few years out of date, from before r***it still existed.

Good to know! Still have to watch out for that every service you receive is counted as “in-network”. I’ve read horror stories where somebody with an emergency goes to a hospital that their insurance promises them is “in-network”, then later receive a surprise bill because one of the doctors that attended them at that hospital was “out-of-network”. Why was the doctor at that hospital then? It’s just something they do apparently.

On the order of hundreds of thousands to over a million dollars without insurance, on order of $50k-$100k in copayments with insurance. Either way will wipe you out financially, effectively forcing you to go through medical bankruptcy and resetting any savings you have to $0. In addition, the equity in your house and car can also be seized, above some personal homestead exemption ($250k in New York for example, where the average house price is $2M, and $5k for vehicle). Not sure if they kick you out of the house immediately, or put a lien on it that comes due when you die/move out and house is sold. The only savings that are safe from bankruptcy are retirement savings in IRA and future social security payments.

but hopefully for the last time

That’s what they said last time. “Never again” etc.

In theory, the rich can just continue paying off each other spending money on rich people stuff. 80% of the economy consisting of activities like robot-staffed billionaire-owned construction companies making and selling super-yachts to oil billionaires, who made their fortune selling fuel to space tourism companies ferrying billionaire designer bag heiresses to the Moon. The rest of us can starve to death and the economy won’t even blink.

I’m coming up with “agent noun”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_noun#Words_related_to_agent_noun

If NYC uses ranked choice voting in the general

It does not, for some weird reason. City primaries only.

This is literally that scene from Schindler’s List where the Commandant sits on the balcony and snipes any prisoner below who isn’t laboring fast enough. And for years they were saying this was unrealistic and such crass cruelty could not have happened!

https://piped.video/watch?v=N0DqnUk90lo

Always has been 🪩👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

The Pied Piper strategy from the 2016 Clinton campaign!

New York City has also banned plastic bags since 2020. I was skeptical about the ban at first, because by measure of material weight, bags are but a small fraction of plastic waste. Thin film is just too efficient in terms of use-per-weight ratio. I also thought anyone who didn’t want to use plastic bags already had the option to bring their own reusable bags with them.

My newfound appreciation for the ban is that not only does it divert the use of plastic material, but it forces a change in the public perception around plastic use itself. Sure, you could bring your own bags, but it felt awkward because no one else did. You felt like you were inconveniencing the cashiers and other shoppers by breaking the routine, as if you were asking for special treatment. But now it’s perfectly normal! You want to carry that bag of potatoes in your arms without an external bag? Go right ahead. You want to run home carrying a jug of milk dripping condensation on the pavement? Doesn’t make you look like a crazy person! All thanks to the ban. Single action by the government on behalf of the collective has achieved what collective action by many single individuals could not have.

For trash I’m still using plastic bags I hoarded in anticipation of our ban in NYC 5 years ago.

Don’t understand why it wasn’t done this way in the first place. RCV was approved as a New York City Charter amendment by a voter initiative in 2019, but only applies to primary city elections, not general. You’d think procedurally it would be easier to justify altering the general election process that the Constitution actually applies to, rather than what is technically internal business of independent private organizations (the Democratic and the Republican parties).

By denying the Constitution of the United States in violation of his Oath of Office, House Speaker Mike Johnson is unironically committing treason right now.

This. Full disk encryption worked on Linux long before TPM, and works perfectly fine now still. TPM to me seems only additionally effective in a narrow range of “evil maid” attack scenarios where your (unencrypted, unsigned) bootloader is modified at rest, such as to steal your disk encryption key later. However A) I cannot afford to hire a maid, let alone one also skilled in editing Linux initramfs images and B) I don’t see TPM evangelists check their keyboard USB cable for in-line hardware sniffers every single time they step away from their desk.

fight FOR the left in primaries, vote AGAINST fascists in the general

That’s how it should have worked, except that in the 2024 Democratic Presidential primary, when Biden was the only name on the ballot, we were STILL told to vote for him and only him or we’d be supporting Trump. In the primary! Voters in Michigan tried to campaign for “uncommitted” option in protest of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and how the administration was ignoring it, and they were crucified by establishment Democrats. Even Bernie Sanders distanced himself from the protest vote, saying to vote Biden no matter what. In the primaries!