Never underestimate human incompetence.
When I was in retail sales for business machines (computers, scanners, cameras etc) a million years ago, one of the things I would demand from my team is that they would never lie to a customer about the capabilities of what they were selling - if they didn't know, try to find out and if it wasn't possible to find out, say "I am not sure at this moment, but leave your details and I will get back to you". The reason for this was because it is always those little "alternate facts" that come back to haunt, and it would be me who would have to deal with the unhappy customer.
Governments are more incompetent than the average person.
And then lie about it.
Let's be honest - it really isn't great they are discussing military operations on an unsecured messaging app, like teenage girls talking about the cute boy in biology class. But then, to keep lying about it, when they know that someone has those texts? Isn't that just asking for it to blow up?
I mean in the media as a scandal, not as an F-18 bombing run in the Middle East.
But they are doing something right for the American people. They are looking to demand that a US passport will be required in order to vote. That is great, as it stops the potential handful of fraudulent voters. Oh, and since only about 45% of Americans have a passport, it also stops all those without one from voting too. But, I would assume there is a law that if it is compulsory to have to vote, then it has to be provided, right?
- 165,000,000 passports need to be ordered.
- wait time is 4 - 6 weeks.
- Cost is $130
- Total cost of passports is 21.45 billion to order
- 20,437,207 applications were received in 2024
- 8x more resources are required to process them in a year
DOGE isn't going to be happy....
And in other news....
Papua New Guinea has banned Facebook.
That doesn't sound like news, does it? But it is. Because the reason for the block as stated by the Police Minister, is under anti-terrorism laws.
“The government has the responsibility to protect its citizens from harmful content and the spread of misinformation. This was a necessary step to evaluate our capabilities in maintaining public order.”
Now at this stage it is being labelled a test and it hasn't been well received, but I think "good on em" for banning that shit. What would be interesting if a country really had the balls to ban them all, unless they started paying their taxes in the country where it is earned. Not that I care about the tax part of it as much, but I think that for far too long, the mass media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and the like, have been able to operate in a grey area where they can financially benefit, but carry no responsibility for the impact of their products on users, or the communities that are heavily affected.
They are the big tobaccos of our time.
Would society be better if everyone stopped smoking?
It got me thinking about it a little about a world without mass social media, and I reckon it would be better for most people's experience. Yeah, the highest earners on the platform would lose out due to not being able to collect hundreds of millions of followers, but celebrity would become far more localised again, meaning that while earnings would go down for a few, many more would have an opportunity to make a space for themselves. Life becomes more personal again, more direct interaction, more conversation, rather than shouting into the void at strangers.
A bit more like Hive.
Just imagine the loss of revenue in the US if the data companies had to pay all of their taxes locally. The Googles, the Microsofts, the Metas and the Amazons - it would have an incredibly large impact on their earnings, which means, a massive impact on the ROI for investors.
The business world needs a proper shakeup.
And so do the governments.
Adjustments to both should be made to align them to the needs of the people, the needs of society, and humanity in general. They shouldn't be operating in ways that cost us in order to increase the wealth of the few - they should be working and facilitating to enable the best from the many. They aren't the stars, they are the tools.
But, we are all incompetent too.
And keep inviting the wrong people into our plans.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
What all were they actually using to message? I thought I heard signal but that is encrypted, which I guess doesn't really matter if you invite the right (or wrong) person to the group chat. I also heard instead of owning the mistake they took the road of saying the reporter works for a crappy paper. Nice redirect... I was horrible at sales for that very reason. I couldn't lie to customers.
It is encrypted, but is it suitable for military operations? :D And yeah - human errors are the biggest weakness of digital security.
They have been attacking mercilessly, which is why he released the full texts that prove they are lying. It is poor PR.
The interesting thing about the approach I took, was we ended up being the most trusted place in the city, so we were pulling customers from competitors. We had no reason to lie either, as we didn't work on commission, and most employees didn't know which items were more valuable or not to sell.
That definitely helps if you weren't on commission. We were on commission and when they made the move to cell phones, the end was pretty obviously in sight. They tied our numbers to that. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to try and sell a cell phone to the guy from the local chemical plant who just came in for a $.39 resistor.
That is a good point. Military stuff should have it's own secure network. People just want what is convenient these days and when it blows up in their face they want someone else to blame.
I think in a lot of ways, these are the dying throes of the current style of government that we've been living under for a really long time. What will replace it is yet to be seen. If we have any hope, it would be things far more decentralized than it ever has been before, and that's important.
I think it's important that we stop letting these mega-corporations operate with impunity. The Gulags and Microsloths of the world trample all over people's rights and have zero respect, while raking in billions off selling their surveillance data and also providing little or no return to the localities they greedily harvest all of the information from. I think that this is such a tangled mess of a web that it's for sure going to be a hell of a thing to unravel!
I hope it will be more decentralised too. Probably can't go all the way, but I think a hybrid system is a step in the right direction. Pare government back to social essentials and infrastructure, everything else goes into public decisions, where tax money is allocated by individuals as they see fit - kind of like the Hive DAO.
Maybe it is a back to the drawing board kind of thing - cut off their global access, and then see what happens.
I'm pretty sure I keep pointing out that hive is social media and it's not the biggest step to banning that on top of all the ones you don't like because as far as everyone else is concerned it's all the same :)
There is a difference though, it isn't centralized. It can be banned of course, but the platform itself is not designed with an agenda in mind. It becomes like a hydra potentially too, since an infinite number of mirror interfaces can be fired up - which makes it quite an interesting experiment!
As happy as I am that decentralised things can happily worm around censorship I was more coming from a principle of things side :) I'm not particularly fond of Facebook or most "right wing" (or even "left wing" these days) things but I am more against anything that bans/deplatforms them because if you're fine with that you have to be fine with the same things happening to whatever you happen to support otherwise it's kind of hypocritical/unfair/double standards ya know?
How human errors and wrong decisions can have such a wide-ranging impact, both at the individual and institutional level. It made me think about how small decisions, from the personal to the governmental, can quickly escalate and generate much larger consequences than we anticipate. Perhaps the real challenge is not in avoiding incompetence altogether (because we are all fallible), but in creating systems that minimise its effects when it inevitably occurs, heh, heh, heh.
Well, systems that minimise the effects of incompetence and failure in general, are distributed systems that are decentralised - like Hive. The thing is though, that they are less efficient and harder to to get large scale operations done at this point.
But soon they will grow stronger and everything will change.
I think it is a bit of a myth that governments are incompetent. Current US administration seems to be hell bent on providing that the myth is true, but notice that they are all coming from a private sector...
At least, they are consistently incompetent at meeting their purpose of improving lives of all citizens.
I find it strange in fact. We elect them in a hope to serve for us, citizens and the whole country for the best; however, later adjustments are made mostly for their intetests.
Yes. And then we elect the next, then the next and the next - even though they all fail.
Inevitably, sometimes some decisions are wrong and we cannot stop it.
Even my grandma knows not to share bank details over WhatsApp. Maybe they should hire her for cybersecurity advice instead 👀🤦
After years of being incompetent I finally surpassed 10k and (11) HP. It is nice to see that now I finally have a bit more voting power.
Hi.
Any raid in Crownrend has been by accident. Often when I raid using a mobile phone, the list of players keeps shifting positions (that annoying refresh every few seconds), so when I click to raid one player, it shifts, and I click on a different one accidentally.
Obviously,y it would make no sense to raid you since I would always be intercepted and lose my own Denar.