Probably, when a certain non supported narrative takes hold, Reuters is tasked with combating it with counter intel to change public narrative. This has been happening since Rome and before. Nothing new here.
when foreign governments and hostile intelligence groups make concerted and aggressive efforts to subvert the US population then, yes, it is appropriate for the USG to make efforts to counter subversion efforts
Personally, I think that if your adversaries are doing just that, a grant with a title related to that makes sense, both to understand the problem domain and to defend against it. Yes, I would want the department of defense to be funding research in this area.
Maybe more importantly, I would not expect anyone to glean anything useful about said research from a title entry in a grants database, or maybe from anything in the grant description. I especially think it's absurd to expect an individual coming from outside government, who is unfamiliar with the details of what is going on at DARPA to pull up the title of such projects and immediately have any idea what the hell is happening. I know this from a bit of personal experience with DARPA projects.
There's a part of me that finds Musk's behavior in all of this to be a massive security breach. You can put aside any of the questions about the constitutionality of funding, this is an absurd breach of national security, both in terms of the INFSEC/IT aspect but also in terms of him casually shining spotlights on projects he knows nothing about and knows nothing of the consequences of disclosure.
It's ridiculous how much attention and handwringing there was about Wikileaks and Snowden, and yet we just let a random ignorant (in the sense of having no idea what's going on in the government — otherwise his exercise would have been unnecessary) billionaire with ties to white supremacist groups tap into the federal government and start blasting it on his personal social media platform. If this was anyone else doing these exact same actions during a different administration, they would be arrested and charged with espionage and treason immediately.
To me it's performative empty arrogance with real security consequences, both for the people whose personal information was accessed but also for national intelligence and military strategies and methods.
The government works for the people. In a republic, we have a right to know how our money is being spent.
Calling attention to how the government is spending our national treasury, is a service, not a national security threat. I don't need to know the positions of the Navy Seal teams before they hit a target. I do need to know if DARPA or USAID or the CIA or the FBI is spending money and human resources in a wasteful or corrupt fashion. I do need to know if they are violating the constitution and censoring speech with OUR money. I do expect people who violate American rights to be fired at a minimum and barred from public service. We cannot be free if we cannot hold our government accountable.
Assange and Snowden should be pardoned. However, the President of the United States has unlimited authority to declassify information on whatever terms they wish.
You already had the right to know how the money is spent, you just never bothered to dig through any of the available public databases to look. That stuff has all been online for years. You are also confusing Reuters, the news organization, with Thomson Reuters, its parent company and a major vendor of information technology services.
Consider doing some more information gathering and analysis before letting your feels post.
<< It's ridiculous how much attention and handwringing there was about Wikileaks and Snowden
The two situations are very, very different for reasons that should be relatively obvious. Musk ( via Trump ) has actual mandate to do that.
<< You can put aside any of the questions about the constitutionality of funding, this is an absurd breach of national security, both in terms of the INFSEC/IT aspect but also in terms of him casually shining spotlights on projects he knows nothing about and knows nothing of the consequences of disclosure.
This may be one point I am kinda agreeing with you on.
<< To me it's performative empty arrogance with real security consequences, both for the people whose personal information was accessed but also for national intelligence and military strategies and methods.
Maybe.. just maybe.. some of those methods should be revised in light of day.
<< Yes, I would want the department of defense to be funding research in this area.
I am genuinely of two minds about it so the question is why you think it is a good idea especially given that you also stated the following:
<< I would not expect anyone to glean anything useful about said research from a title entry in a grants database, or maybe from anything in the grant description.
Either it is ok to fund it, because you think it is a good idea or you don't know what it is and still think it is a good idea. I can accept one of those propositions.
Friend, I accept that there is a level of snark, when it comes to this stuff, but even rudimentary check of the website in question[1] will tell you that there are two pieces to this program:
- ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED)
- LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)
I presume you are being snarky about ASED. I was thinking about the other one.
Where are you seeing that there’s two pieces? I’m only seeing it referred to as one program there. I’m not a govt contracts expert so by all means let me know what I’m missing.
<< One thing to consider for those of us who are more sensitive to online outrage is to just quit social media all together.
Yes. I still have to be at least aware of what is happening for work reasons, but removing social media was one of the better decisions for my sanity ( I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well, which in itself is a concern suggesting further digital landscape deterioration ).
I considered some more obvious solutions ( from buying subscription to WSJ/FT to personal news aggregator -- and objective/neutral observer rewrite using LLM and they all are not exactly ideal ).
Here is the good news. All this chaos is an opportunity to stand something useful up. And I mean something useful that cannot be so easily dismantled by powers that be ( and there are already heavy indications they are aware people may try going outside the defined paths ).
> I stil comment on HN, but the quality of conversations was degrading as well
Yeah I agree that many HN comments are unfortunately pretty bad, but I think this should only motivate people like you and me to try harder to make HN a better place with constructive, useful comments :)
If things are not getting harder then either they stay the same or get better. I would find it hard to argue for either of those positions, but I would welcome you to try to defend that "things are not getting harder". In just about every possible metric outside of maybe "few really, really wealthy individuals make more money" things are not getting better or are stable.
Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014 and is sharply decreased since 2019. Lower income people are making more money than ever. There was a period of no income growth for upper-middle class people, however, which probably made them unhappy.
What did happen in the last two years was there was a "vibecession" where everyone decided to pretend the economy was bad even though everything about it was objectively good. You can see this in surveys, because everyone answered them with "I'm personally doing well, but I know everyone else is doing badly because I heard it on the news".
Note, this was written at the tail end of the inflation period and none of the predictions of bad things quoted in the article actually happened.
Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
Ok. First, the 1st paper is interesting, but I can't digest it now. Added to the list for later.
That said, temporarily ignoring the paper, income in absolute terms may have well increased, but from 2014 to 2024 we also had ~33% official CPI inflation ( edit: which is well above FED's goal ), which effectively eroded any gains average person may have managed to eke out. In other words, it is not a vibe whem that 100k+ is getting you ~33% less. It is simply what things are.
<< Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
I am not hopeful, but I am willing to accept it as a possible outcome.
<< Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.
Apologies. Let me look at the link provided.
I am going through the paper now and the things that did jump at me that while you state that your post was inflation adjusted and I will admit that I am not sure it says what you claim to think it says. Lets go over relevant passages.
From quoted paper[1]:
"Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers.
Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression."
In other words, higher absolute values were considered to be good predictors for wage-phillips curve ( which shows a relationship between the unemployment rate and wage growth ). I worry that you saw word real wage and made an assumption that it measures real wage. It doesn't. We can argue whether it is a good proxy, but from get go it is tougher sell. In other words, if methodology for attempting to derive real wage is off, the whole premise falls apart from where I sit.
"Moreover, despite substantial post-pandemic inflation–measured with the benchmark Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U)–real hourly earnings
at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution rose by 7.8% between January 2020 and June 2023."
Ok. This is where it does get messy, because I genuinely do not want to get into the weeds here, but lets... for the sake of the argument assume all that including methodology is fine.
"Real US hourly wages rose by approximately 10 percentage points at all percentiles during the first quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March through June of 2020. (As we show below, much of this spike reflected a change in composition of the workforce as low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs.) Thereafter, these quantiles diverged. The 10th wage percentile held its real value over the next three years, while the 50th and 90th real wage percentiles fell by around 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In net, the 90/10 ratio declined by about 8 percentage points over these three years "
In other words, for the period of time listed, assuming we accept the premise, methodology and so on, wages rose above inflation. And then, those same real wages fell on average of 8% between July 2000 and 2024. I don't know man, it sounds me, again if we accept premise, methodology and so, as if things got briefly better and got worse again. So my example of 100k became 92K..
FWIW, I am really curious of how you will defend it.
> Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
I don't read any such suggestion into the person's post; to me, it seems to mean what it says. As to whether individual needs and societal needs always align, I would guess you probably know the answer is "no" -- but also far from "never"
The whole Wall Street reaction was fairly fascinating. I suffer no illusions about Chinese government, but like with Meta's move, it is bound to generate similar waves. I have already seen posts online asking to curb foss from China suggesting establishment was hoping this wouldn't happen ( and we can speculate as to why ).
Oh, I don't know. In my current and previous job I was, frankly, amazed at the ronin-like attitude openly expressed by those new, young hires. I was nowhere near this radicalized, when I started my first 'real' job. Management is in for a rather rude awakening.
This. Without going into specifics, I attempted to internally transfer to another team for higher level/better pay position. My current boss said he doesn't have a problem with it. I pre-cleared everything with the possible new boss, but I got mysteriously blocked. Few months later, team member from the other team indicated that they were told not to let it happen ( and who said no ).
Needless to say, I am miffed. The market is what it is right now, but not only am I not 'allowed' to move around, but stuck with the same pay/benefits, because my raise was.. lets say not great.
There is not enough .. not hate.. not enough awareness of how corps fuck you over and HN can help with that a little.
I've seen this but with the guy's manager being the blocker. Manager tells high-performing employee that he's gone (probably for some BS personal reason--the guy was good), but company policy is that he gets two weeks notice before his last day, and if he can find another team to transfer to, then he can stay. Well, since he's a great employee, multiple teams are interested, but Manager blocks them all, and the guy ends up having to leave.
Come to think of it, this is what our management seems to be trying to do now. If true, that is mildly amusing given that we just managed to avoid major pain resulting from all those helping hands.
We are apparently going through a "year of efficiency" and most of us know what it means. After "more with less" round come layoffs so one might as well do some basic prep work, dust off resume, reach out to your support network.. just saying.
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