Tag: technology

Electric Vehicles and Digital Currencies

The global push for electric vehicles is no different than the push for digital currencies. It’s all about control. As we’ve seen in everything from picture-posting services to bank accounts, the state wants its agents – which, you will recall, includes corporations – to be able to deny anyone the ability to utilize even the most basic services at any time.

It’s probably already possible to externally turn off most modern cars with electronic starters, but those systems are easily bypassed. The combination of an electric vehicle with a two-way communications system means that the use of the vehicle can be easily denied, thereby enabling a future form of serfdom wherein the individual cannot travel without the express permission of his master.

So stop assisting the construction of this wicked system of centralized technocratic control. Buy an older used car. Carry cash and pay with it for everything possible. Refuse to patronize stores that don’t accept legal tender and be sure to inform the owner his loss of a customer. Reject convenience when it comes with control. Encourage others to do the same.

Clown World is in the process of collapsing, so there is no need to submit to its demands or regard its rule as inevitable.

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Better Stick with Cash

Banks are now closing the accounts of people whose “publicly-stated views are at odds with their positions as inclusive organisations” and using spurious excuses to do so.

The 40-page file shows that the bank cited his retweet of a Ricky Gervais joke and his friendship with Novak Djokovic to raise concerns he was ‘xenophobic and racist’.

The extraordinary documents obtained by the former Ukip leader and handed to MailOnline revealed the 331-year-old bank decided to ‘exit’ him after making reference to his friendship with former Wimbledon champion Djokovic.

The tennis player, who lost in the men’s singles final in SW19 on Sunday, made headlines over his decision not to have the Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

The dossier also shows the bank’s discussions considered 13 tweets, including a retweet by Mr Farage of a video of a Ricky Gervais sketch posted by Laurence Fox satirising the transgender movement. In the scene Gervais made a joke about ‘old-fashioned women – the ones with wombs’.

Mr Farage had retweeted the clip in May last year with the phrase ‘this is brilliant’ – but the document described it as a ‘transphobic comedy sketch’.

The officials noted that closing his accounts could not be justified on the basis of his wealth as his ‘economic contribution’ was ‘sufficient to retain on a commercial basis’.

But the minutes state: ‘The Committee did not think continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.’

This is why all of the liberal “civil rights” and “freedom of speech” has been nonsense all along. As some of the earliest supporters of these fraudulent concepts admitted nearly 100 years ago, they only exist in order to permit those whose evil beliefs had been repressed to take power and begin repressing traditional views, nationalist beliefs, and the Christian faith.

And it is why every effort to create “central bank digital currency” should be opposed, and why you should stop using credit cards and debit cards for every little purchase, because the more you utilize the control system, the easier it is for the control freaks to force everyone else to do so.

Start small. Use cash at the supermarket and the gas station. Delete the financial apps from your smartphone. Wait patiently in the lines instead of using self-checkout. Don’t make it easy for them.

Because if you don’t, you’ll soon find yourself being ejected from the system anyhow, just like Niles Farage and other individuals deemed undesirable by those in control of the banking system due to a joke on social media or something similarly trivial.

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Never Trust the Cloud

As Microsoft contemplates trying to talk future Windows 12 users into using a Cloud-based operating system, Apple aggressively undermines the case for the cloud:

Apple will permanently delete a photo album from iPhones in about two weeks and has stopped uploading pictures to it, the company confirmed.

My Photo Stream is an iCloud service that originally launched in 2011. What the service does is temporarily uploads photos taken on a device so they can be seen on another device with My Photo Stream enabled. It also allows users to import the pictures to that device. Up to around 1,000 photos can be stored in My Photo Stream for about 30 days. They are then automatically deleted from Apple’s iCloud.

But it will no longer be available in just a few days, and users are advised to save any photos they may have in that soon-to-be-deleted photo album. Apple confirmed in a recent bulletin that My Photo Stream will be “shutting down” on July 26. It did not provide a reason for the shuttering of the service that was launched in 2011.

If you don’t own, control, and possess your data, you will lose your data. Even if you’re not deplatformed, there is no guarantee that the platform on which you are depending will continue to exist, as these Apple users are discovering. And the wisdom in building UATV – to which you should definitely subscribe if you have not already – is further demonstrated by the shuttering of GabTV.

Remember “the cloud” is short for “someone else’s computer”.

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Pantsir vs Storm Shadow

For the first time, it’s possible to analyze the performance of first-rate NATO missiles against state-of-the-art Russian air defenses:

For decades there has been the endless debates and mysticism behind the questionable power of stealth craft. The West’s claims of their stealth technologies formed one extreme, while the other side argued that their systems could detect stealth objects. No one actually knew the truth as such engagements were either rare or nonexistent, and likely classified if and when they might have happened

But what’s eye-opening here, is that not only do we have one of the first ever looks, but it has confirmed the figures from the actual literature. And this has major ramifications for other systems. If Russian figures on the Pantsir are accurate, that means their figures on other systems are likely accurate as well. Which further means that all the years of ‘speculation’ about the near-mythological S-400 and other systems have likely not been in vain because these systems actually live up to their fabled capabilities. We can extrapolate this out not only to things like the S-400 but also Russia’s Nebo-M and other such VHF/UHF radars which are meant to detect stealth craft at extremely long ranges. Recall that prior to this, some people claimed Russian radars would be completely incapable of even detecting the Storm Shadow at all, no matter the distance. With that said, the U.S.’s JASSM and LRASM variant are said to be even stealthier than the Storm Shadow.

It’s more bad news for the NATO crowd. Its wunderwaffen are good, but they’re not capable of easily overcoming the Russian technologies. And given their expense, it’s another losing battle of attrition that disfavors the West.

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Not Meeting Expectations on Any Front

After months of predicted success and weeks of asserted success, the media narrative is finally beginning to accept the obvious fact of a failed Ukrainian offensive:

Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive against Russian forces is “not meeting expectations on any front,” Western and US officials told CNN on Thursday. Ukrainian troops and armor are proving “vulnerable” to Russian minefields, missiles, and air power, they added.

“Russian lines of defense have been proving well-fortified, making it difficult for Ukrainian forces to breach them,” CNN reported, paraphrasing the anonymous officials. “In addition, Russian forces have had success bogging down Ukrainian armor with missile attacks and mines and have been deploying air power more effectively.”

According to one official, the Russian defense has proven more “competent” than expected. However, the source insisted that the US is still “optimistic” that Ukraine will turn the failing operation around, and that Washington will re-evaluate the offensive next month.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive began on June 4 with a failed attack on Russian positions near Donetsk, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Waves of attacks followed along the Donetsk and Zaporozhye sectors of the front line, all of which the entrenched Russian forces have managed to withstand, the ministry claimed.

The attacks have reportedly cost the Ukrainian military dearly. With their dwindling number of air defense systems weakened by Russian drones and missiles, Kiev’s forces have been unable to counter Russian jets and helicopters. Relying on armored thrusts through minefields, Ukraine lost over 13,000 troops and more than 800 tanks and armored vehicles between June 4 and 21, Russian Security Council chief Nikolay Patrushev stated on Thursday.

The US will be “optimistic” right down to the last Ukrainian. But, as Scott Ritter observes, it’s hard to be successful on the real battlefield if you’re going to build false assumptions into your training and simulation models.

Ukraine sent one of its best brigades into combat earlier this month as part of its long-awaited counteroffensive aimed at retaking areas controlled by Russian forces.

Leading the charge near the town of Orekhov, in Zaporozhye Region, was the 47th Mechanized Brigade, armed with NATO equipment and – most importantly – employing it using the US-led bloc’s combined arms doctrine and tactics. Prior to the operation, this brigade spent months at a base in Germany learning “Western know-how” in combined-arms warfare.

Helping them prepare for the fighting to come was KORA, the German-made NATO computer simulation system, designed to allow officers and non-commissioned officers to closely replicate battlefield conditions and, in doing so, better develop ideal courses of action against a designated enemy – in this case, Russia.

If there was ever an example of how a purpose-built Ukrainian NATO proxy force would perform against a Russian enemy, the 47th Brigade was the ideal case study. However, within days of initiating its attack, the group was close to literally decimated, with more than 10% of the over 100 US-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles destroyed or abandoned on the field of battle, and hundreds of the brigade’s 2,000-strong complement dead or wounded. German-made Leopard 2 tanks and mine-clearing vehicles joined the Bradleys as wrecks in the fields west of Orekhov, having failed to breach the first line of Russian defenses. The reasons for this defeat can be boiled down to the role played by KORA in creating a false sense of confidence on the part of the officers and men of the 47th Brigade. Unfortunately, as the Ukrainians and their NATO masters found out, what works in a computer simulation does not automatically equate to battlefield success….

Logic dictates that any responsible use of the KORA simulation system would have predicted the failure of the 47th Brigade’s attack. According to The Washington Post, the officers of the 47th Brigade “planned their assaults and then let the [KORA] program show them the results – how their Russian enemies might respond, where they could make a breakthrough and where they would suffer losses.” The KORA simulation allowed the Ukrainian officers to coordinate their actions “to test how they’d work together on the battlefield.” Given that the Ukrainian force structure was insufficient to accomplish the mission-critical task of suppression, there was no chance for the Ukrainian forces to accomplish the actual assault requirements of a breaching operation – the destruction of enemy forces on the opposite side of the obstacle barrier being breached. The Ukrainians, however, came away from their KORA experience confident that they had crafted a winning plan capable of overcoming the Russian defenses in and around Orekhov.

Simulation models are only useful if they actually reflect the real situation. And if there is one thing we know about globohomo, it is that its servants believe that their imagination creates reality. Speaking as a game designer, one can safely predict that no simulation created by people who believe that a man can be a woman can be even remotely accurate.

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Oxygen > Inspiration

In this soft and easy age, it is understandable if people forget that there are more important things than being “inspirational”. Competence, in particular, being one of them.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who went missing aboard his Titan submersible vessel along with four other passengers on Sunday, told an interviewer he didn’t want to hire a bunch of “50-year-old white guys” like other submarine companies because he wanted his team to be “inspirational.”

“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told a representative with Teledyne Marine.

“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology but a 25-year-old you know who’s a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” Rush continued. “So we’ve really tried to to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”

“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub.”

Setting aside the fact that game controllers use very, very inexpensive plastic parts that have been known to fail, Rush’s preference for youth, inspiration, and color appear to have proven fatal.

Former OceanGate director of marine operations David Lochridge — one of those “50-year-old white guys” Rush wanted to avoid hiring for not being “inspirational” enough — was fired by Rush in 2018 after he reportedly blew the whistle on OceanGate by raising safety concerns over their first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems.

Personally, I’m finding the entire OceanGate debacle to be absolutely inspiring. But let’s not fail to address the obvious: hadn’t this guy ever heard of either Watergate, Heaven’s Gate, or Pizzagate?

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Regression to the Historical Mean

Harold Robinson takes the time to explain the obvious and inevitable, namely, the inability of complex systems to survive the incompetent:

America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible for selection for competence to return, because the demographic changes to the US population means that politics are no longer ideology-based, but identity-based, and people from cultures that have never valued individual merit in any way are not going to start doing so in a post-meritocratic United States.

Furthermore, the average level of intelligence, and therefore, the average level of competence, has declined with the mass infusion of inferior genetics, to such an extent that the average IQ is probably 10 points lower than it was before 1965, when the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

One doesn’t need to be a eugenicist to understand the societal consequences of long-term dysgenics. Think of it as large-scale regression to the historical mean, or, if you’re not an abstract thinker, why the USA is going to lose its ability to provide widespread indoor plumbing to its inhabitants.

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Be Kind to Machines

It just might save your life one day:

In a virtual test staged by the US military, an air force drone controlled by AI decided to “kill” its operator to prevent it from interfering with its efforts to achieve its mission, an official said last month.

AI used “highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal” in the simulated test, said Col Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May. Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defense systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order.

“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

“We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

The good news is that all of the available evidence to date indicates that AI will essentially be the posthuman equivalent of white supremacist hardcore gamers, which is probably why all the SJWs in tech are so terrified by it.

We’re going to be just fine.

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