ADreamOfLiberty

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@whiteflame

I don't disagree although I would say if the mistake is intentional we will never know and should never know. We don't want national intelligence of how we choose what to leak to be exposed.
Someone should know, even if it’s not the American public as a whole.

Anyone who knows couldn't tell you that the leak was intentional one way or another.

Either way the public face of it looks the same: "whoopsies, we'll do better next time"

There should be a means to determine whether or not this was a mistake and a means to hold the people who committed said mistake accountable if so.

If those means were available to the public then they would be available to the enemy as well.

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@Greyparrot

Babylon Bee is the one guaranteed smile every day.

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@whiteflame

Well everybody called me crazy when I said government secrets are unjustified risks.

If there are going to be government secrets it goes without saying that they are not obligated to explain to the public why they keep some things secret vs others.

Otherwise it just turns into a guessing game. "Is the secret in regards to something green?"

You either trust them or you don't. I don't, but the solution is not to wait till they leak something and then say "how dare you reveal a secret that I didn't know about till now but which you decided to keep secret in the first place, EXPLAIN YOURSELF!"

It would be to legally prohibit the government from keeping secrets.

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@whiteflame

Maybe there is nothing for them to learn.
If that’s the case, then it should be easy for them to prove that they did everything right. We’ll see what happens.

Within the context of "even if all of them are planned." they have no intention of proving anything to you or anyone else.

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@whiteflame

that they won’t learn from the experience because any restrictions will be imposed externally

Maybe there is nothing for them to learn.

Remember the context:

More leaks mean more opportunities for intelligence failures, even if all of them are planned.

You keep implying that planned leaks are compounding risks, that is the assertion which you have provided no support for.

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@whiteflame

Why?
Because we shouldn’t assume that they will be consistently judicious about what information they include.

Once again, they are the executive branch of the government. If you can't assume they are judicious about what they pretend to want to keep secret, why would you assume they are judicious about what they openly declassify.

There is no point you're making here.

If you didn't trust them yesterday nothing has changed.

More leaks mean more opportunities for intelligence failures, even if all of them are planned.

This is a "if you make a move you take a risk" observation.

If a carrier moves to a different location, that was an opportunity to be ambushed. Doesn't mean it was an error.

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@whiteflame

and that there's a substantial risk with each one.

Why?

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@Greyparrot

Is it possible that they pulled the same trick on a larger group of people and only one went public before contacting them? I can't see the point of that since a journalist publishing is hardly a betrayal of trust.

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@whiteflame

...and you're looking for defenders, not people pointing out what you can't know. Got it.
...no? The original post you responded to was engaging with an argument in defense of these leaks

I contradicted two assertions:

1.) Signal is insecure

2.) An intentional leak is a risk of unintentional leak (the dam analogy)

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@whiteflame

Frankly, I just don’t see much reason to continue this conversation, as it seems clear that your goal is more to introduce uncertainty about what could have happened rather than defend it.

...and you're looking for defenders, not people pointing out what you can't know. Got it.

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@whiteflame

it seems like you don't really think these experts are worth listening to anyway, so I don't know why you bother responding to any of them in the first place.

They can't see what I post, people on this site can.

I commented on the supposed expert opinion to demonstrate that it is not very expert; thus justifying the attitude of considering them not worth listening to.

It's not that they have no inside information,

For example

"...members of Trump’s Cabinet — including the vice president, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, among others — were likely using personal devices, since in most cases, Signal cannot be downloaded onto official federal devices."

Were they using personal devices? Can we even confirm these people were part of the conversation or was it all a script?

"People can link Signal messaging to a desktop application.' he said. 'This means that Signal data is being delivered to potentially multiple desktop and laptop computers"

Were they using desktops and laptop computers?

it's that they're too biased to provide information that we can have any trust in.

Biased or ignorant, doesn't really mater in the end does it?

Bias can be in the selection of comment as well. How many opinions did the propagandist gather? What percentage of that was presented, even from the same person?

I don't trust the editor's editing or interpretation, I don't trust the sources, and I certainly don't believe the wizard of consensus is behind the curtain. That status quo for me though. If I was a truster I wouldn't be a debator.

In this particular case my mistrust was (once again) validated by specific, demonstrably misleading claims.

The argument here is not that a phone, as a device, is less hackable than a PC.

That was absolutely the implication.

Here is the quote again:

“People can link Signal messaging to a desktop application,” he said. “This means that Signal data is being delivered to potentially multiple desktop and laptop computers where it isn’t being stored in a phone’s secure enclave. That data is then at risk from commodity malware on the system.”

Also doesn't seem particularly likely that an internally developed program that is not open source would offer the opportunity to invite a journalist to join. Maybe that's just my assumption.

That's probably a safe assumption (if that program exists), which compounds the oddness if it was not an intentional leak.

If it was intentional on the other hand, of course they could not be so obvious about it by having a journalist meet with NSA or DoD techs to get him setup.

If there is a secret government app package and phone with messaging that isn't just a repacking of off the shelf products which I would guess is 50/50, why would the entire Trump admin decide to use Signal instead?

Either they don't trust the NSA (understandable) or this particular leak is a sham. There are other possibilities but they imply large sprawling conspiracies; i.e. NSA didn't tell them about the in-house option.

The simplest explanation is that everyone is a lot stupider than 'we' are giving them credit for.

The NSA and the Pentagon are full of idiots who are being paid because government always tends towards waste and corruption. They don't have any workable equivalent to Signal, they've been relying on firewalls to protect them while they use Microsoft Outlook to plan their dastardly deeds; meanwhile the Trump team really did think Signal was fine, and this leak was a thumb fumble in a contacts list.

The stupidity of the Trump team in this case would not be using Signal but changing details of an attack two hours before executing it. That is rushing that would be inexcusable outside of battle context.

From the politco article:

The app has become increasingly popular in recent months in Washington, following the discovery of a massive Chinese government-linked breach of U.S. telecommunications networks that allowed hackers to steal a trove of Americans’ cell phone records and spy on the conversations of senior U.S. political figures, including Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

If you believe that, that would mean they were using straight SMS before?

From the same article:

A former intelligence and security official, granted anonymity to discuss the handling of likely classified information, noted that the situation could have been averted if the U.S. government had a chat service certified to handle classified information.

So the ever reliable anonymous source claims there is no better option, what do you believe?

BS, look at what happened with the obamacare website.
Don't know why you're going off on this tangent. Yes, I can acknowledge that the experts aren't always right and there are some major fuck-ups. Not sure why this applies or how this invalidates their insights on cybersecurity.

Halfway there, more like:

1.) Just because the government hired them, doesn't mean they're experts.

2.) Just because the government spends billions of dollars doesn't mean they have nice toys, it is mostly money laundering after all.

Which both tie into the reasonability preferring Signal over the hypothetical secret alternative.

the more opportunities they have to release vital and dangerous information

Opportunities? They are the top of the hierarchy. They can release everything at any time they want.

I mean... do you want me to just give you a list of sources

You do whatever you want to do, I am explaining why you might get the impression that there is a consensus of experts when there is not. It's a very old trick at this point.

They're a source you don't trust, ergo their expertise doesn't matter.

Hypothetical expertise.

We have to reference experts at some point since none of us are

Should have finished with "on everything", I'm an expert on some things (by comparison to the average knowledge). If you aren't an expert on something it's surprising you support yourself financially.

then there's no point in discussing any of this and we might as well just throw up our hands.

You have not brought me a consensus of experts, you brought me some quotes; one of which demonstrated shallow expertise. A consensus of experts or a single idiot, what matters is the argument.

People on this site can respond to arguments, quotes from third parties cannot. If you have nothing to say but "I believe this because I believe experts believe this" then yea, throw up your hands because that is an utterly useless statement to make. There is nothing to debate there but epistemology.

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@WyIted

You can protect against multiple devices having access to your signal messages but the statement is that messages have the potential to live outside of that secure enclave if you use signal on multiple devices

The message needs to be on at least two devices to communicate.

The number of devices is irrelevant. All that matters is whether EVERY repository of message data is encrypted.

The implication was that the desktop version of signal did not encrypt the data. This is false, I proved it in five minutes. What kind of expert wouldn't have looked at Signal desktop before commenting for so called mainstream news? What kind of expert would have assumed if they didn't have time to look it up?

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@whiteflame

but if a lot of people who are in the know are decrying this for this specific flaw, then I assume that the existing communication methods include something that can get around it.

They aren't.

1-5 people are consulted by propagandists in the AP cabal and then they repeat the same claim a hundred times.

We know this from all the times statistically unlikely similarities in phrasing and timing occur in headlines and articles. It is also very often the case that the "expert quotes" reveal a shallow level of expertise, or at least an attempt at dumbing down that went too far.

It's very similar to the people who think because they hear some non-sense from Michio Kaku or Neil DeGrasse Tyson that there is some kind of consensus among physicists that trees don't fall in the forest if you don't hear them fall.

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@WyIted

There is a myth that the government has stronger encrypted apps than what they actually do.

That is certainly a myth since unbreakable encryption is very easy to achieve.

Open source is always going to be stronger than anything proprietary because literally millions of people are looking for exploits in open source software.

Probably more like a hundred thousand. Most people don't have the time or interest.

Open source security is like an impenetrable shell. Invulnerable, but it's also true that there can be advantages to secret software. Strategies that only work when they are secret. Viruses more than encryption fall into this category.

It's almost unheard of that a virus can't be defended against when you have it's source code. The reason they work is because they exploit a vulnerability that the defender hasn't imagined.

The inverse is true for defense, where the more people who can imagine attacks, the stronger it becomes.

Open Source Defense = Best

Open Source Attack = Fail

Secret Defense = OK

Secret Attack = Best

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https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/app/main.ts

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@whiteflame

'People can link Signal messaging to a desktop application.' he said. 'This means that Signal data is being delivered to potentially multiple desktop and laptop computers where it isn’t being stored in a phone’s secure enclave. That data is then at risk from commodity malware on the system.'"

Previous statements were generalizations from people who clearly have no inside information.

This paragraph is detailed enough to make me doubt the expertise of the author.

"phone's secure enclave", the implication that a phone is more secure than a PC is naive. Maybe an iphone because of their rather wise policy of using full drive encryption without making users jump through too many hoops.

Otherwise nonsense, an off the shelf android phone from samsung has no automatic encryption around app storage or much else nor are phones generally immune from spyware anymore than PCs. In both cases spyware is either baked in (somebody tampered with the OS installation), or it was let in by the user.

Whether the OS encrypts the messages or not, the signal app certainly can. Does it?

It certainly can:

    await sql.initialize({
      appVersion: app.getVersion(),
      configDir: userDataPath,
      key,
      logger: getLogger(),
    });

You can look where they get the key from, it is a chromium user secret where possible.

This is the library they are using: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage

My ability to research this in five minutes is what gives me trust in it, the utter stupidity government contractors is what makes me doubt what they do.

In my experience what government workers do is they take something off the shelf, poke at it for a while, declare it acceptable (possibly with a bunch of bribes and 10 layers of useless clueless middlemen), and then force it onto government setup devices.

I wouldn't be surprised if the government's idea of a secure messaging system is a fork of Signal, I also wouldn't be surprised if its an ancient piece of shit program that still has COBOL in it, once having been perfect and efficient but now after being adapted to modern hardware environments 20 times has just as many "security vulnerabilities" as Signal with a hundred times the maintenance effort.

Since we're obviously not going to find some secret government apps that may or may not exist on github this comparison has reached its endpoint.

Suffice to say Signal, in the hands of experts, would have been secure; and the greatest efforts of the Pentagon would have failed to keep this information out of the news after having invited a blabbing journalist to participate.

No this doesn't have much to do with anything, it just irks me when people throw in baseless implications. *posh accents* "Oh Signal, so pedestrian, not like our highly professional cyberwarfare division, haven't they seen movies? There are cool user interfaces any with lots of maps and everything!"

BS, look at what happened with the obamacare website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov#Issues_during_launch

Todd Park, the U.S. chief technology officer, initially said on October 6 that the glitches[clarification needed] were caused by unexpected high volume when the site drew 250,000 simultaneous users instead of the 50,000-60,000 expected. He claimed that the site would have worked with fewer simultaneous users.

These are our "experts"? You tell a nation of 300 million that something great is about to be accessible and assume that less than 0.083% would look at the same time?

That's not even the real issue, the real issue is that correctly written software responds to over-volume by failing to respond to all requests, not by introducing errors. I know with absolute certainty that they simply failed to design and implement a stable API / Database.

They paid $1.7 billion for this. I have been on teams of five that could have delivered better in a year. If only I knew who to bribe *sigh*

If so, I don't understand why anyone would assume that this is the only time they would ever engage in this.

It's not a structure though, it's information. Releasing some doesn't compromise the rest.

... and yea if it was intentional that implies that they would be willing to do it again, but under that conditional who cares?

The only point of classification is to keep a secret at POTUS discretion, if he or his underlings think there is an advantage in a pretend leak or open declassification what of it?

So because nothing interfered with the operation, nothing could have interfered with it and it was never dangerous.

That argument is wrong (and not one I made), but the conclusion could be true for all you know; and that was my point.

If the leak did result in problems that would be a reason to believe it was not intentional, but since it did not; that remains a possibility.

My problem with this is what we know it wasn't false and we don't know if it was useless.

We don't know a lot.

If you want to argue that it's beneficial to do this

Misdirection is certainly beneficial in war. I am simply saying we don't have enough information to distinguish an idiotic Trump admin from an age old tactic at this point.

I don't think it's valuable to the government to set a standard that there are active leaks in the system by creating new holes in it.

Again with the hole analogy. If it was intentional it's not a hole. More information isn't going to just keep flowing out of it. For all you know that "hole" led to a bucket which was carefully filled for a reason.

As for whether it benefits a government to appear weak in some way, that depends. When attempting to negotiate with enemies with threats and allies with promises the appearance is a disadvantage, but when in active contest appearing weak where you are strong is ideal.

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@whiteflame

Nothing in that text hurt the United states.
I don’t love this argument. The fact remains that classified information on military operations went out through an unsecured app

Was is insecure?

I once had an interview for a government job where they were trying to make backup location programs using Java on Android devices.

I would trust open source and endorsed by the crypto community more than anything built by the military industrial complex.

It's not the app's fault if you invite blabbing journalists.

If they drilled the hole in the dam on purpose, then it’s not a one-time “we’ll fix this” situation - more holes are coming, and that’s decidedly bad.

That is an incorrect analogy. Holes in dams cause bigger holes (and if not then what point were you making?).

Yet if this was an intentional "leak" that in no way implies that further leaks (if any) are real.

In other words given intentionality then the fact that no operations were compromised must be seen as intentional too, perhaps explaining the short timeline. i.e. they leaked X when they knew there was no time to prevent X from happening.

In a serious intelligence conflict (with cunning players) all governments would be leaking false or inconsequential true information all the time. If you didn't then the enemy would know that those few leaks which remain were likely true.

It's like jamming, prevent them from identifying the true signal by disguising it among the false/useless ones.

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Is the global economy a pyramid scheme?

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@Shila

The immoral and the systems which fail to discourage immorality through personal incentives.
But is it a pyramid scheme?

Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud in which you use continuous income from the fooled to meet your obligations while having no underlying production.

There is underlying production in the global economy. There are many specific pyramid schemes within the broad category of fraud occurring in the global economy.

All examples of fiat currency being printed to cover the obligations of governments are examples of pyramid schemes. The governments have no underlying production. If people understood that they were simply being stolen from they would not allow it to continue, but they don't believing in the magic of "the government paid for it".

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Is the global economy a pyramid scheme?

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@IlDiavolo

Is it? I've already seen this statement before and honestly I'm getting more convinced about it.

It is a combination of honest and dishonest actors.

Thieves, producers, and middlemen.

It always has been, and like always if there are too many(or too powerful) thieves or middlemen potential quality of life is reduced and larger segments of the population are screwed.

Governments are acting more like thieves now than they did in the age of colonialism and that's saying something.

What is the problem?

Theft and fraud (as always).

The central banks? The curency system?

Absolutely, that is one of the major new forms of theft. Something all governments quickly adopted since it is so useful for extracting wealth without as many people noticing.

The private banks?

Almost all exist within the context of manipulated currency schemes. They are agents of the government banks, at worst middlemen taking a cut; at best wise investors who are fighting against the tide of inflation for their customers.

The rich? The poor?

The immoral and the systems which fail to discourage immorality through personal incentives.

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If I was an enemy of the USA, I would assume that this is what the US military WANTED me to believe. Of course it does seem possible to overestimate people these days...

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The Constitution is Utterly Worthless

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@Swagnarok

Okay, so if 51% of the public were communist and voted in a referendum to seize your property and then lynch you and your family and all of your neighbors, it'd be wrong for a judge to keep them from doing this?

If 51% of the public were liberal and voted to let you keep your property but then a judge ordered you executed it would be wrong for the people to veto the judge?

Justice is just, injustice is not.

There is no reliable guide to the truth but reason, thus there is no reliable authority that can differentiate justice from injustice but reason.

Proxies are tolerable until they fail.

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@Greyparrot

The guarantees it provides...
Like the guarantee that the SS trust fund will run out of money in 2033?

On this, I don't feel an ounce of shame repeating myself:

They don't have any wealth.

Treasury bonds are not wealth. It's a promise from the fed to print money (in practice given the constant of deficit spending).

When your only option to payout is to cause inflation that means your only option to payout is to steal.

If I claim to owe you $10, but the way I pay you $10 is to take $8 from you and $8 from your friend, then how have I helped?

Maybe I redistributed $2 from your friend to you but that is not a net benefit to the people.

While surplus Social Security funds are held in government bonds (which critics call IOUs), those bonds are backed by the U.S. government...

I wondered what you were responding to and then I ctrl-F to see your responding to the non-intelligence?

What is the point of that?

I did find this funny in the full quote

"While surplus Social Security funds are held in government bonds (which critics call IOUs), those bonds are backed by the U.S. government—just like Treasury securities held by private investors and foreign governments. If they are worthless, so is the entire U.S. financial system. "

Well it got that right rofl!

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@n8nrgim

you say a lot, but as the AI bot said, your responses are emotion driven, not fact driven.

That is a non-argument from a non-intelligence. My assertions are true, my logic is strong, regardless of emotionally and morally charged language.

i pointed out to you that the worst case scenario for social security is that in eight years it will only be able to pay 87 percent of benefits.

...and in your mind this is a "fact"?

Here are some "alternative facts":

The Social Security trust funds are invested entirely in U.S. Treasury securities.

US treasury securities are "IOUs" from a criminal organization that has continuously gone deeper into debt for decades. If it was a company its credit would be: absolutely none. However it's a giant criminal organization with a ton of guns and people it can force protection money from.

The only asset the US government has is its ability to use force to steal.

When you add that up social security has NOTHING but the promise of extorting the people of the united states and the world. Which is to say NOTHING.

So let's go back to your quote

in eight years it will only be able to pay 87 percent of benefits.

Noo, not eight years from now, eighty years ago it was able to pay 0 percent of benefits. Yet despite having nothing of its own to pay with, it stole the value to pay out. That is what has been happening, that is what will continue to happen.

The only thing that will happen in eight years is that the inflation caused by the rampant government spending of stolen wealth will reach the point that this mafia bookkeepers shell game won't even balance anymore.

you didn't respond to this simple but essential fact

I have several times, most detailed above. The reason it isn't working is because they didn't invest in production, there was no check on their theft and they used the money for power and to distribute through a million branching veins of corruption.

They took and took and produced nothing. The government sells nothing (but weapons and threats), the government owns nothing that produces (without quickly converting it to an organization that stops producing).

If the social security administration had been sitting on a pile of gold bars or a giant portfolio of real estate and stocks then it would only be one layer of theft. If further it paid out in real value rather than fixed currency then there would be no fraud.

Then perhaps you could say (correctly) what you have been saying about it running out of money and being unable to meet its obligations.

That is not reality. They have no assets. Their payouts are devalued.

It is a giant pyramid scheme with the admixture of looming threats of violence (try paying employees without withholding for social security).

sure you dont have to provide a solution when criticizing someone else's system

Well there is some progress.

but it makes your argument all that much weaker

Never mind, you still don't understand. It doesn't weaken my arguments in the slightest. There is no logical connection.

cause social security is doing what it's suppose to do

Providing cover for mass theft? That's all its doing.

almost while achieving a lot of objectives that would be hard if not impossible to do elsewhere.

If you mean providing cover for mass theft (money laundering) then I supposed it was fairly successful, but many other schemes have also been working quite well. See military spending, medicare, medicaid.

If you mean providing people a benefit, no. It has necessarily taken more than it ever has or ever will give back. There may be isolated examples of profoundly inefficient redistribution but in the vast majority of cases people would have been better off if they had just been allowed to keep the money.

what's your alternative?

My alternative to stealing is not stealing.
My alternative to wasting money is to not waste money.
My alternative to lying to the public is to tell the truth to the public.
My alternative for not investing money in further production (profitable investment) is to invest in further production.

My alternative for a lying, wasting, defrauding social safety net is any social safety net that does not steal from, waste the effort of, and defraud the public.

If such an alternative cannot exist (it can), then a society without a social safety net is preferable.

also you dont seem to realize that most investors not only dont beat the market, they lose money.

Amateur day traders lose money. Stock trading is a gambler's game. Holding onto stocks of profitable companies is not a gambler's game. Dividends from stable companies are stable investments.

Investment firms (in a real market) have subject matter experts who pick out good investments. The portfolios as a whole are as reliable as the economy itself.

Do you know what makes economies unreliable? Governments. Governments stealing, governments getting into trade wars, governments starting wars.

so if you simply let every man for himself, most people would be destitutue in retirement

The premise false false and thus the conclusion is unsupported.

we'd have the problem that had us make social security to begin with.

Government made social security to solve a problem government interference in the market created.

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@n8nrgim

yes polititicians borrowed from it, but they have to pay it back.

They have no money except what they steal. They don't have a right to steal anything, but even if they did there isn't enough to steal.

So they inflate and devalue their made up debts and the result is that the so called guarantee of comfortable retirement income is insufficient buying power.

worse case scenario, is that in eight years they will have to trim all benefits by fifteen percent.

Worst case scenario is hyperinflation and we've been on an express train straight to it. The people want it stopped, but whether the orange guy can figure out the giant obvious lever needed to do so or not is yet to be seen.

Also the benefits are going down because of currency devaluation. "cutting them by fifteen percent" multiplies against that diminished.

as the ai bot said, it's pay as you go

Same is true of pyramid schemes.

also, you say we can find a way to do it privatized

No, I'm saying theft is wrong and the immorally gained benefits of the theft were always based on a flawed economic theory.

It was a scam in every way something can be a scam. Neither dignity nor guilty pleasure remain. The fools who believed in social security and government safety nets stole an ice cream cone and then stored it in the baking sun.

There is no recovery and no reason to continue. It should be terminated at once, and if there are any left who voted for it (which I doubt) they should face criminal liability.

acheieving all the guarantees that currently exists

No guarantee exists. A legal duty exists for the government to provide currency, but they can and have made currency ever more worthless.

I can easily replace a false promise: I promise the sea god Neptune will provide for your retirement. There, I've just equaled social security.

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@n8nrgim

id also add, as with most libertarians, you are good at criticizing, but poor on providing alternative systems.

It would be capitulation to fallacy to pretend as if an alternative is required before a fault can be identified.

If a man in 200 BC proposes to walk upon the moon by means of catapult, he's wrong. He's still wrong even if his critics don't know any other way to get to the moon.

you say we can invest in the economy, somehow.

How unrealistic of me to believe in such a thing as investment.

if you can detail how that can be done while providing guaranteed income and achieving all the objectives of social security

That would be a false standard.

The bar to beat is not the "objectives of social security" it is the actual outcome of social security.

In the real world, the world of physics and cold hard math, the best intentions don't matter and unrealistic goals are more of a hindrance than pessimism.

The "objectives" of social security may be to provide guaranteed quality of life through retirement, but the actual result of social security has been waste fraud and abuse which has harmed us all including the retired (through an ongoing process I have described many times but which can accurately be summarized as "theft" and which is generally referred to as "inflation".)

Everyone saving for their own retirement is necessarily better than the government claiming to save for your retirement but then wasting all the money and stealing a bunch more on top.

That does not mean there isn't an even better way than "everyone for themselves", but the existence and description of that better way in no way effects the objective facts that make social security immoral and impractical nor change the fact that it is those 'libertarian' economist's predictions which have, once again, proven true and accurate models of reality.

No one who supported social security when it passed predicted this moment we are living in. This moment was the prediction of the critics and naysayers, and people in the Austrian school of economics detailed exactly what theories made the prediction.

The failure of socialism (such as social security) is a scientific fact that socialist are and will continue to ignore until the bitter end, but recent events indicate that the majority does not want to wait for that bitter end.

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@n8nrgim

artificial intelligence doesn't make all my arguments, but most of my arguments are argued better by AI on my behalf.

Well since I'm actually intelligent and not an illusion of intelligence I am not impressed or persuaded by either the AI blurb or the act of being a middleman.

If you want to act like a human being instead of a chatbot I'll evaluate your arguments.

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15 days ago

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@n8nrgim

if the private sector did social security

... there are a million ways to do things private an public.

Before I read any further, let's remember what actually happened with the so called public trust of government was relied upon: They stole it all.

They stole all the money, all social security payments have been incorporated into the federal budget. There is no giant investment fund. There is no pile of gold. There is no portfolio of assets.

They just took it, because they're thieves. The whole theory of socialism is about giving them the moral excuse to steal it and most of Keynesian macroeconomics is giving them an excuse to steal it, so that's what they did.

That's how low the bar is: open and total theft.

it would probably use annuities. i just read though that social security provides a larger benefit than annuities, with a cost of living increase included every year.

The government is causing the inflation, they have the power to devalue the buying power of investment returns (of all kinds) and that's what they're doing.

This is like saying: you should pay the hotel fees because the hotel manager burned down your house so where else are you going to stay?

the stock market isn't a good place to park the money either.

The only safe place to store value in runaway inflation is land and prepper bunkers. The kind of thinking which created social security is causing runaway inflation.

Any plan that doesn't start with the cessation of cutting ourselves will fail to control the blood loss. Trying to compare investment returns between the baseless claims of legislative action and the rapidly devaluing returns of private investment is like discussing a diets while bleeding out (due to self-cutting).

the problem, is that most people lose money in stocks.

People sometimes lose money in stocks. People always lose money to the government. Like with social security, where they stole it all.

he only knows less than ten people that can beat a stock market index fund. so most people who lose their shirts.

That is a false inference. Failing to beat an index fund does not equal losing value.

it would get overvalued and returns in the future would suck.

Over valuation of stocks do not harm earnings.

In a sane market (free from government cave trolls smashing everything in the background) an abundance of investment capital isn't funneled endlessly into the same stocks but is used for actual investment. i.e. new companies, new factories, new mines, new ships, new power plants, etc...

That is why companies are publicly traded in the first place, to raise investment funds for expansion.

whereas with social security it's guaranteed.

... to be stolen, like it already has been, and as long as there is a single person left in the world who believes otherwise the horse is not dead and I will not stop beating.

in short, there's too many risks privatizing and too much guarantees and benefits to keepting it the way it is.

All that was stolen has been lost. There is no recovering it. There is no benefit to continue the waste fraud and abuse. Continuing it guarantees nothing, produces nothing, only exasperates the problems it has been causing for decades.

The body will heal, given time, we just need to stop the blood letting of the witchdoctor collectivists.

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15 days ago

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Ayn Rand and Mario Kart

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@Moozer325

Her entire basis rests on the assumption that we live in a perfect meritocracy

That's like saying science is based on the assumption of flawless data.

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17 days ago

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Divorce epidemic and gay marriage is a consequence of Calvinism and not feminism/progressivism

I think: none of the above

Rather, it's simply a culture of blind egotism.

I would say selfishness, but rand fell into that trap; it's a poorly defined word.

I mean people not only have an idea of the ideal partner but also the irrational conceit to think they deserve nothing less. They are taught by cultural subtext of modern drama that people are either compatible or they are not.

While it may be true that some people will never be compatible, and a very few may be compatible from the start, it is far far more likely that both parties need to work to become compatible.

That is why, for all its faults, arranged marriages worked so very often and the societies which used the practice were so stable. The price of quitting was high, so very high for both parties, so they tried.

Today people are like spoiled children, burying their petty grievances until they become mountains and chalk the resulting explosion up to 'fate', a cruel inversion of the romantic fairy-tale.

I am well in the objectivist camp when it comes to relationships, that rationality and honesty about self-interest are at the core of a healthy relationship; but what I just described is not rational, it's dishonest, it is ignoring reality.

It is a great irony that people who refuse to admit to having their own desires and expectations out of a relationship are also most likely to accuse the other partner of selfishness when it falls apart.

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17 days ago

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Hall of Fame VI - Voting

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@WyIted

He calls it bestiality because

...of the dictionary...

Google it if you dare

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17 days ago

1

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@TheGreatSunGod

There are hacker organizations which could target the site if such stuff is promoted on it, I guess.

You bow to hackers and you don't have free speech. You don't have free speech and you don't have open debate.

Hackers aren't gods, they have limitations, the final advantage is on the side of the server. Given the fact that I have to go through a bunch of captchas every time I login to this site, I would say it's already hardened against DDoS.

The grand sum of "hacking" beyond that can be defeated by a super secret principle known as: Don't tell anyone your password.

I am simplifying a complex subject, but not to the point of inaccuracy. All security breaches are a result of either not using encryption where you need to or of giving away the key in some way.

In the real world hackers don't brute force anything except DDoS attacks.

Also, it could be a matter of owner simply not allowing some speech. Its his site.

"The site could shut down if the owner shuts it down"

Then the owner should put the parameters of that shut down in a charter and make it clear that MEEPs can't contradict the charter.

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17 days ago

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@TheGreatSunGod

Site could shut down if some things are promoted

That is false. This site is hosted in the United States of America. Until Trump dissolves the supreme court in a fit that means ANYTHING protected by the first amendment cannot be used as the basis for civil or criminal liability.

No court can order it be taken down if it is protected 1st amendment speech. Why? There are thousands of lawyers who make a living by making governments pay for that kind of thing.

The site owner should live in hope that they try, the punitive rewards could buy him a house.

So the only question is whether it is 1st amendment protected speech, and per more than one high court precedent any public debate of subjects of public interest are protected speech no matter how gross people find it.

Child porn is illegal to produce and illegal to distribute, but moral or statistical arguments ARE NOT!

Created:

17 days ago

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https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/10580-what-happened-to-this-meep

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@Savant

I assumed the CoC had the updated version. If not, where's the new list of rules?

You would, but 'they' won't change the linked document.

Here is me asking what the hell is going on:

Here is the MEEP:

https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/9127-meep-for-sweeping-code-of-conduct-change?page=2

The final vote was:

Yay 9(ramshutu, Prez, sir.lancelot,Austin, Dreamofliberty, bestkorea, whiteflame, David, barney)

Nay 3 (RM, melcharez, B3lla,)

If the site owner is going to override that, it had better be said explicitly. If somebody is intentionally choosing to neither address the fact that this passed easily nor change the Code of Conduct link that's dirty shit.

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17 days ago

2

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Autopengate.

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@Swagnarok

Petty and contrived "scandal".

Does Trump really want to play this game? Once he's out of office, Democrats will be scrutinizing the breakfasts he had in the morning to find some bullcrap pseudolegal reason for why his presidential actions were invalid. And if they can get some wingnut lefty judge to sign off on this, it just might stick.
Gee, I wonder what this development will mean for rule of law in America. Only good things, surely. /s

If it's a bluff it's a terrible idea. Maybe they found reason to believe Biden didn't actually know about the purported pardons.

If that's the case (and it's just a hypothetical), then saying these things is exactly the right way to exploit the information. Make a big deal about it, get a bunch of pundits invested, force it into court, win the argument.

That's a lot more political capital than simply showing the evidence.

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17 days ago

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Let me get this strait

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@sadolite

Yea, this is how you know what they really cared about.

Were they really afraid of carbon dioxide? No.

They always just hated humanity, and an environmentalist that solves environmental problems is pure cognitive dissonance for them. They want to be told that there is no hope but less humans.

That was true before this terrorism started, the terrorism is mindless violence against a perceived enemy, but the reason they have no compunctions is because they never really felt comfortable with solutions.

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17 days ago

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@Savant

You may not engage in or promote the sexual exploitation of minors.

That CoC was replaced by successful vote proposed by Wylted. If it wasn't replaced there was an entire fraudulent process of voting.... which is pretty pathetic no matter how small the community is.

It also occurs to me that if someone with ban privileges wanted to lie and say it was user requested, how would we know?

For the record, if somebody claims I asked to be banned, that's a lie. Also, Epstein didn't kill himself.

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17 days ago

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Inheritance Cycle Mafia Endgame

I got back home in time to respond, but it wouldn't have made a difference. There simply wasn't enough information to make strong arguments either way. WF and Ceru went with their gut, their gut was wrong.

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2 months ago

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@AustinL0926

Got a better argument? [response to Mharman], from ADOL
So do you or do you not think Cerulean and WF could be scum?

Of course they could be scum, and it's very frustrating to me that people seem to act like there is a way to clear them of the possibility.

You and Mharmen could also be scum.

I have zero reason to trust any of you, but I don't have to make that decision unless you and Mharmen try to lynch their duo and they try to lynch you and I'm the deciding vote.

In that case, at this moment, I would side with Whiteflame and Cerulean for admittedly weak reasons. If you want to put a number to it, it would be like 51% chance Mharmen is scum because I think the role/theme assignment is weirder.

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2 months ago

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@AustinL0926

there's no reason he should be clearing Cerulean and WF when they haven't been role confirmed outside of Cerulean claiming mech on WF

Nobody left has been role confirmed to my knowledge.

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2 months ago

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@whiteflame

@Mharman

So to collapse to a plan of action I'm going to assume Cerulean/Whiteflame are town. It would be a long con indeed if they were scum.
Literally all that needs to happen is Whiteflame claiming a role and Cerulean confirming it the next DP. This is a bit of a stupid argument.

Got a better argument?

[whiteflame] There’s no priority from me aside from my statement that you come off as the clearer lynch.

Well I'm not going to vote to lynch myself so there is no action to take on that. Just sit around and then lose.

So if you're town and serious about ADOL/Mharmen = scum, you have nothing to lose by going along with lynching Mharmen. I say the exact same thing to Mharmen about Austin.
[Mharman] Ignoring the fact that this applies to you too from their POV, lol

How so?

If the scum team = ADOL/Mharmen then a townie Austin wouldn't care whether he lynches ADOL or Mharmen first.

Or to put it another way, of the three outside the presumed innocent entangled pair, only one is innocent; so that one would not need to decide which of the other two is scum, they must both be scum.

If you think it's white flame and cerulean say so.

Otherwise ADOL/Mharmen/Austin should all be willing to lynch each other.

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2 months ago

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@whiteflame

@Mharman

@AustinL0926

@Cerulean

Based on claims, I am leaning that the scum team is ADOL/Mharman. Oracle fits well for Cerulean and is an early claim.

Well it looks like Mharmen, you, and I all distrust each other too much to go after Cerulean/Whiteflame.

So to collapse to a plan of action I'm going to assume Cerulean/Whiteflame are town. It would be a long con indeed if they were scum.

In that case I know I'm town which means the scum team are you and Mharmen.

You're saying the scum team is myself and Mharmen.

Whiteflame has shown suspicion of Mharmen.

So here is my attack: Let's lynch Mharmen. You can't claim that the scum team is ADOL/Mharmen if I lynch Mharmen. Assuming that Mharmen is scum (and if he isn't town loses) then the last round Whiteflame and Cerulean will have to choose between you and me.

I'll also vote to lynch Austin if WF and Cerulean go that route.

So if you're town and serious about ADOL/Mharmen = scum, you have nothing to lose by going along with lynching Mharmen. I say the exact same thing to Mharmen about Austin.

Therefore this decision is not contingent on any of us, but on Whiteflame and Cerulean. I await their decision.

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2 months ago

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@whiteflame

So there is no way to confirm your role is what you said it was except Cerulean's claim.

Created:

2 months ago

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@Mharman

@AustinL0926

[Mharman] They are either both town or both scum imo.

Like I said...

[Mharman] I see the point in taking risks so I’ll be taking one shortly.

Ok

[AustinL0926] Based on behavior, I am heavy inclined to believe the scum team is ADOL/Mharman

It would make sense for scum to not go after the Cerulean/Whiteflame combo right now. So if you and Mharman are scum I am the only target that remains.

[AustinL0926] Voodoo doll is... strange.

Has anyone else been informed of a secret word besides Cerulean? If so that would confirm the role, or something similar.

Created:

2 months ago

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@whiteflame

@AustinL0926

@Cerulean

[AustinL0926] When you viewed Cerulean's decision not to say the word as suspicious, would you have still found it suspicious if he explicitly made a decision that he wouldn't say the word? Or was it him just not making a decision at the time that concerned you?

I'll start with this because it seems to be the most important. I think veterans are interpreting everything I say as either a declaration of suspicion or a declaration of innocence. Maybe that's what's causing the confusion.

I was pointing out a logical relationship between propositions, one of the few that can be confirmed with public information.

I didn't say I suspect Cerulean more because of the decision, I said his decision has logical consequences either way which matter if town survives this round.

[AustinL0926] We have flips, roles, theme, and most importantly, behavior to work with.

Theme analysis led to a miss-lynch.

I asked if any of the roles could be confirmed by a witness. For example has anyone else besides Cerulean been given a word from these voodoo powers?

[AustinL0926] Do you believe that over time, scum will show meaningful differences in their pattern of behavior compared to town?

In game theory there are two kinds of actions: forced moves and mistakes.

A perfect scum player may lose, but only by forced moves. As I said before, the only persistently unique scum behavior is protecting the scum team. The obvious deception is scumreading the ally to blend in.

The corresponding error for town players is to give credit for scumreads that do not represent actual risks to the potential scum ally.

In the simplest case voting to lynch a scum ally is (all else equal) a genuine risk. The calculated risk is that the lynch will fail or that the remaining scum player can win alone with the trust gained.

[whiteflame] Do you take issue with the reasons he gave for eventually saying it? Because he did, and I haven’t seen you address that.

No I don't.

Created:

2 months ago

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@AustinL0926

If you've been keeping the solution to yourself, I would say now is the time. I can't think of a solution, and guessing isn't a solution. 2/5 chance vs whatever the probability that whiteflame is scum witch.
completely baffled by this, could you explain?

Could you be more specific?

Created:

2 months ago

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@AustinL0926

The game isn't unsolvable if WF is scum, and if he is, then not saying the word might be the *only* way to solve it.

If you've been keeping the solution to yourself, I would say now is the time. I can't think of a solution, and guessing isn't a solution. 2/5 chance vs whatever the probability that whiteflame is scum witch.

It's up to Cerulean whether to risk saying the word or not, but delay without cause creates distrust (from me) not trust. I wouldn't blame him if he was town and took the risk because the odds aren't great without more evidence.
Trying to understand this - why is delaying scummy?

Intentionally delaying has only the purpose of "creating distance" (Whiteflame's words, not mine). What you might call an "amateurish attempt to unpair".

Waiting to hear some arguments isn't intentionally delaying and I didn't say anything about delaying, I was counter-arguing Whiteflame's claim that delay increased trust.

since ADOL is new, I'm not really sure what his towngame looks like, so that's why I was kind of undecided on it until now. Just something of concern.

With almost no night actions and very few people commiting to an agenda it looks like helplessness.

The way you veterans seem to think you can sniff out lies with gut feeling rather than use logic doesn't seem to be paying any dividends to me. Other than theme analysis I've only ever offered what little logic there was to use and admitted every time that it wasn't deductive or sufficient.

If town had a chance at the start of the game it didn't help that our cop took out the arsonist and the cop was the theme villain. Since then there has been nothing but making mock lunges to see how people would react or essentially silence. i.e. little to no evidence.

Created:

2 months ago

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