Their routers only have this feature because the internet providers who sell those routers pay for bandwidth themselves lol. If residential internet plans sold on a pay-per-byte basis you can bet routers’d still ship with non-unique passwords.
Probably not news, but here are a few big ones that I remember from our conversations:
1. Family member lived in a rural area. They could see the train line that ran between two major cities. I can’t remember the exact order of events (e.g., construction), but at some point they noticed packed trains turning off the main tracks to go to a facility. Packed trains went in, and empty trains came out. At first they didn’t think anything of it… just resettlement stuff or war stuff or whatever. But then it continued. And continued. The rumors started. Everything was hush hush. Nobody dared to ask the authorities. Only later did they learn that it was a concentration camp and what actually happened there. That one kind of blew my mind… they had no idea about what was going on except vague rumors, most of which were wrong.
2. One family member had access to privileged information about the war (in the later stages of the war). One bit of info they knew was about causalities, and how certain assignments were less survivable than others. The propaganda machine made it seem like it was noble to go fight the war that would inevitably be won, but this person knew with a reasonable degree of mathematical estimation that some of the kids being sent off weren’t likely to come back. They said it was tough to look those parents, especially mothers, in the eyes when they made some comment about hoping their kid came home safely. My family member knew that these parents would likely never see their son again, and all for what was looking like a lost and/or questionable war effort that was still playing on nationalist sentiments.
3. This really isn’t that interesting, but… The propaganda late in the war made it seem like Germans in general and the troops specifically were eating well with an abundance of good food, while people who actually grew the food had to do things like use sawdust and straw as filler in their bread. They had a long list of accommodations that they told me that they made so that they didn’t feel hungry, and I don’t remember them all. The cool thing is that there were ways for the rural folks to get access to food beyond the rations. Sometimes they could sneak some extra food to the city-dwelling family members, but the folks in the cities seemed to have it tougher. They were sort of bitter about how the food situation got progressively worse as the war progressed as well as the total disconnect from reality that the propaganda was presenting.
Note that these were stories that were told to me decades ago about stuff that had happened many decades before then. I’m sure that some stories were embellished while others were muted. I’m also sure that some of the details were “lost in translation” — either via my mediocre German, their mediocre English, or the limits of language assistance that some of the bilingual folks provided.
I don’t really feel like I did these stories justice.
Almost 80 years has passed, some details get lost, but it is important to keep things like that alive in our consciousnesses. Even if you didn't to justice to those stories, I still read them with attention. Thanks for them!
I just remember feeling like I had been punched in the gut after some of these conversations. It was like history had come alive right before my eyes.
I remember having a few sleepless nights just processing the things I had been told.
I remember almost throwing up once (the night after the story about the trains). I just couldn’t believe the level of depravity was so easily able to exist with basically no questions asked.
I remember my naive younger self thinking about what I would have done had I been in their shoes. It didn’t take me long to realize that I probably wouldn’t have done much differently, mainly because their range of options were so limited (or at least perceived to be so, with detention, death, or “disappearing”being the consequence if you were wrong).
I also remember them talking about neighbors snitching on each other (probably to the gestapo, but it could have been another entity). Some neighbors with petty intentions would make up false claims about neighbors they didn’t like. This forced everyone to be on “perfect behavior”, and it sowed a lot of distrust in normally tight-knit communities. There was one story about a tattle-tale who had a come-uppance, but I can’t remember any of the details. I think that was the first time the word Schadenfreude came alive to me… it existed in that story on multiple levels.
The old quote, "first they came for ..." was written by a Nazi sympathizer -- until he was in jail by them. It's rooted in truth how it played out to him.
"First they came for DEI and I didn't speak out, because I was not Black..."
And what of those who speak out against it because they find it belittling personally? What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits? Are we allowed to speak out and have differing opinions on DEI or will you compare us to National Socialism collaborators?
Do white people feel like tokens because the merit of other people isn’t considered?
DEI makes sure that everyone is part of the merit process.
It’s like how white people feel like Babe Ruth is an all time great, but say Josh Gibson isn’t because he played in the all black league. But playing in the all white league doesn’t count against you at all. No one considers them any less.
> What of those who do not want to be included as a token or talisman, but would rather participate based upon their qualifications and merits?
There were plenty of companies like Coinbase that ignored DEI initiatives and requested that employees leave "politics at the door" - and we all knew what kind of politics they meant. You could have voted with your feet.
I'm fully onboard with employees asking employees to be respectful to their colleagues regardless of gender, race, creed or color, that's just good for business.
Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.
> In March 2014, Tunney petitioned the US government on We the People to hold a referendum asking for support to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the technology industry, and appoint the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.
DOGE is staffed precisely by the tech elite. Like 20 year old grads who are elite programmers winning competitions, that type.
Are they not part of the tech community now? You highly overestimate the political homogeneity of the tech community, because opposing voices were previously so shut down. You would be surprised by what your co-workers are thinking deep down.
That feels like a No True Scotsman argument after decades of chasing VC approval, prestigious jobs at those huge companies, and adopting their practices and software. I don’t like the oligarchy either but it’s a huge part of the tech world under any definition I can come up with. We’re having this conversation on a board run by one of the VC firms with partners who are openly supportive of what’s going on, after all - is this not part of the tech community?
Honestly fair enough. Pay package over principles does pretty well describe the policy of far too many of the colleagues I've worked with over the years.
Sure, but there’s a lot of shared culture even though they have distinct subgroups. I don’t think the guys in the news wouldn’t be welcomed at most startups.
I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.
With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.
Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.
And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.
Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg was decidedly non-Nazi (and was regularly attacked as a “white jew”), and even though he had ample opportunity to leave, he chose to stay to work on the German nuclear fission program.
I don’t think it tarnished his scientific legacy, but it definitely created some friction in the post-war years.
It's funny how the politicization of science in Nazi Germany led to things like "Aryan physics" to counter the "Jewish physics" of Einstein's relativity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
Along with the flight/expulsion/imprisonment/murder of top scientists who weren't ideologically or racially "pure", it's no wonder their nuclear program was such a failure.
It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.
There's such obviously fucked up incentives in this industry.
- When employers select insurance, providers will 100% of the time tend toward ignoring the interests of those who are insured: the incentives to do so are just too strong.
- When an insurance company also owns a pharmacy, it will 100% of the time tend toward overcharging: again all the incentives encourage this.
Unfortunately it seems most folks have little or no experience analyzing incentive structures when looking for levers to pull to improve outcomes. It'd be great to see popular discourse focus more on the environmental factors that incentivise these kinds of corporate abuse.
This is, in a significant part, the flip side of the housing crisis coin. Some of these mums and dads saved up but many, many more of them grew their wealth alongside their home values.
Zoning policy, building regulations, and interest rates are a massive gate guarding generational wealth, for better or worse. Having personally suffered a lot for my parents poverty and homelessness, I have my biases, but then again don't we all.
I recently read a piece of local news on housing policies (Austin, TX) and the journalist made the observation that affordable housing is inevitably tied to reducing property values, which is a major source of wealth for older generations. It made me realize why some folks would be against zoning changes and other pro-housing policies, because it might actually impact their personal wealth. I don't know why I never correlated the two before.
It isn't this simple. Literacy plays an important role in information assessment and in decision making. It's strongly associated with health, success in personal finances and career path, and relationship satisfaction, to name just a few areas that have published papers readily accessible online.
To get a look at the ugly side of this, high demand religious groups are a fascinating case study. Constant circulation of repetitive cliches is a key mechanism for isolating their members and making them easier to manipulate.
I'm surprised to see so much confusion here. Google pays some kind of "market rate" to Apple to be default search engine on iOS, this change'll first and foremost result in them paying similarly to be default in Chrome.
Hopefully through that Google will end up with less influence to force anti-consumer decisions, like the recent adblock downgrades, on Chrome.
Fair enough, right? Of course all this is assuming decent oversight by DOJ, not allowing the sale to someone with monopolistic incentives of their own, e.g. Microsoft.
