I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
The dark hordes of Popeyes gather, worshipping their false poultry god, but their 11 spicy lies shall not sway us, for we are Cane’s Chosen and we will fight to the last tender!
For those reading this is like when millennials would just pile every slang and acronym possible into a sentence as an inside joke of sorts. For "gamers" think: "I are 73h 1337 h@xZ0r all ur base r belong to us LMAO XD"
I have, but I forgot the storyline… well, remeber it kinda vaguely. The original trilogy is what is burned in my mind, I was a kid, it was a great trilogy.
Fact is, satellite internet from low earth orbit is the best solution in some parts of the world, and the ones to blame are literally the exact ISPs it’s competing with by providing service to the underserved. It’s a necessary option in providing the constant connectivity out society expects and relies upon (whether or not intermittent outages should be acceptable is a different discussion)
I would love to see some legislation requiring satellite ISPs to share infrastructure so we don’t have 3 incompatible competing services with duplicated but not necessarily redundant infrastructure. That would be a far more useful goal to push for
So… I can’t answer your questions but is is certainly in Israel or the settlements due to the writing’s on the ads.
There is no doubt that Israel would not allow anyone but themselves to behave like that inside their own territories of control so i’d say that it is pretty safe to assume that it is an Israeli authority of some sort.
I would argue with the current… state… of Israel and with the intl pressures and propaganda both who and when leaked it are quite relevant. It contains no context of who these people are (police, armed forces, paramilitary), who they are attacking (cant say I see any reason to treat the second one like that regardless), or why. It is absolutely framed as a random attack on civilians, but what is the context - is it a random attack?
Regarding who and when, there are significant propaganda campaigns on both sides and this provides considerable context. MEE was found to be editing historical videos and adding on Al Jazeera logos to make old recording look like they were Regarding events only a few hours old to spark outrage, Israel is… well being Israel… so there is much more behind this than a 32 second video viewed in Isolation.
See this is the first issue I see - im arguing with someone else who calls them police, but you see them as soldiers. People can’t even identify who is who.
Right now the only thing telling me this is Israel is the title of the video, and one person telling me the signs in the back are the right language.
Thanks for that information - learnt something new today about where it is spoken and signage.
I’ve updated a few of my other comments- can’t deny this is IDF (patches are covered by look similar) but date and full story are up for context. Regardless, pretty damming evidence of conduct against any civilian population.
It takes literally 1 googling for “Israeli military police” to verify that the uniforms and gear are the same. There are multiple signs in Arabic and at least one in Hebrew.
You can choose to keep pretending this is not painfully obvious but this is the last I’m responding to your sealioning trolling.
Exactly, and that poster knows what they’re doing, and it’s not a quest for any truth. A form of gaslighting and covering up Israel’s well established apartheid now outright genocide.
Yes, poor you, we are harassing you for just asking questions about just the basics.
Rhetorically, sealioning fuses persistent questioning—often about basic information, information easily found elsewhere, or unrelated or tangential points—with a loudly-insisted-upon commitment to reasonable debate. It disguises itself as a sincere attempt to learn and communicate. Sealioning thus works both to exhaust a target’s patience, attention, and communicative effort, and to portray the target as unreasonable. While the questions of the “sea lion” may seem innocent, they’re intended maliciously and have harmful consequences. — Amy Johnson, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (May 2019) [6]
idk why everyone is angry about pointing out the limitations of contextless garbage content that asks the audience to substitute filling in the blanks with your imagination for journalism. Though tbf it seems like doing actual journalism on this kind of thing is a very dangerous occupation right now.
This is the point I’m trying to get across - three basic questions we learnt in primary school. Who is this, when did it happen, why did it happen/ why is it important? I’ve had one person tell me it looks like Israeli MPs, one say its police, and someone tells me it’s likely in Israel or a settlement. I’ve been called biased and worse more times than someone can answer the basic question.
The problem is that every article is designed to be read in three seconds, or watch a video that tells you how to react to it, with no authority or actual fact behind it.
Perhaps one should go to the website whose address is written in the corner of the video? I struggle to find the article for this specific incident, because there seem to be over a thousand written articles, going back as far as 2009.
This does seem like a common theme with mass produced articles.
Another poster did provide quite a bit of information in one of my other comnents - it can absolutely be located to Israel/Palestine, 99% sure IDF based on uniform and all a blury patch comparison. Timing and story are up for debate, but issues can absolutely be drawn regardless of who the person is at the receiving end.
Questioning calling it evidence of Israel apartheid or individual actions, but it is a piece of a much larger puzzle.
In short - the site is soo biased and unfavorable they have been banned by X, tiktok and Meta. They have a reputation for being used to fund militant group.
“The Jewish News Syndicate reported in 2023 that the Australian Jewish Association had criticized the site as “a notorious anti-Israel antisemitic propaganda platform affiliated with Hamas.”[9] Twitter subsequently suspended QNN’s accounts in November 2019 as part of broader actions against accounts linked to militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.[10][11][12] In January 2021, TikTok banned QNN, stating that it was a move related to the account’s content.[4] Meta suspended QNN’s English and Arabic pages after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.”
(AP via wiki)
It also reported that while QNN says it is independent, it has a reputation of being associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group.
Not exactly a group I would associate with providing the full story
So you’ve cherry-picked from the Wikipedia article, with the transparent goal of trying to persuade that this organisation is not reliable. For example, I could say the following:
From Wikipedia:
In short - the site is independent, one of the most popular news sources in Palestine. Some people have tried to connect them to Hamas, but nothing has stuck. Israel killed the director of the site in 2023.
“In 2015, the Christian Science Monitor reported that the network was run by 12 freelance correspondents and 60 volunteer field reporters…”
“The QNN states it is independent and funds itself through advertisements, and that it aims to expose the acts of the Israeli occupation.”
“QNN director Sari Mansour and freelance photographer Hassouneh Salim were killed by an Israeli airstrike on the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on 18 November 2023”
Now I’m not saying I’m convinced either way. But my question is why are you trying obviously to convince me one way?
I’ve cherry picked because this video has been cherrypicked, and arguing with someone who’s just repeating its a video and just take what they call it as fact.
Its like me saying “this is a video of Israel discussing and enforcing the best way to protect Palestine civilians while they protect themselves”, putting up a video of a few people in a uniform talking and expecting everything to comment back how amazing Israel is - I would expect everyone to cherry pick the issues with me doing this, especially when all I do is repeat “but its a video”.
You cherrypicked because you have an agenda to push and it is obvious. First you try to sow doubt by “just asking questions” and then “cherrypick” a wikipedia article, trying to gaslight people who literally just watched a video.
Its like people sprouting “prove God doesn’t exist” - im not the one saying this is a fact and need to back it up.
Saying that, one other poster did provide me with some pretty good insight with sources - ignoring before/after video possibilities the evidence they provided is pretty damming to Israel, and even without it they would have alot to answer for.
Well played, you seem to always question and needle at posts that show crimes against Palestinians. Never seem to question or confront the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza. Never question the land grabs, the constant illegal settlement building, never the well established apartheid by Israel. Bravo, you’re not bad at being an apologist for genocide. Your willingness to dehumanize the Palestinian people still reveals itself. Regardless, the world can no longer unsee the horrors in Gaza. They are starting to see that Israel is led by religious fanatics, and has become its own worst enemy.
Its almost like there is an entire propaganda campaign from both sides where facts and accuracy have taken a back seat to pushing agendas and swinging public opinion. Like the amount of people outraged by half truths is covering accurate reporting and fact from authoritive sources, and arguments are downvoting anything that doesn’t confirm to their already established world view that was built on these half truths.
If you’re that pissed, block me and move on - because the basic who/when/where still hasn’t been answered.
Sealioning. ‘Both sides’ you say, and when was it that you ever focused on both sides? Tell us, what do you think of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza? The total leveling of infrastructure, schools, hospitals? Conditions of famine? Do you want to look up for us how many times Israel was called out for illegal settlement building going back decades? Did the land grabs ever stop? The apartheid upon the Palestinian people? The slow genocide now turned blitzkrieg. The fanatics in charge?
Why should this even matter? Every android has a proprietary parts of code that need to be included even in custom roms. In case of ios devices, the entire OS is proprietary. I would much rather use a Chinese android phone with an unlocked bootloader than an american iphone.
Hey, look at this guy! He thinks Qualcomm gives a shit about his privacy!
Both American and Chinese phones use Snapdragon chips. If the American government is spying on you, despite your phone having said Snapdragon, what makes you think the Chinese government isn’t also spying?
Your whataboutism is slightly concerning, it’s not like China is also home to Hauwei or anything…
And if it’s one with a Snapdragon CPU, the NSA probably knows too. And while China is rather authoritarian, and I’d be worried if I lived there, currently I’m more worried about surveillance by a government that has more influence on the country I live in, and likely shares data with my countries intelligence services.
Which of course doesn’t mean I like the thought they might be doing mass surveillance of people.
Yeah this is exactly how I feel. Like sure I don’t want China to spy on me but I don’t plan to go to China so it doesn’t really matter. What matters more is the USA spying on me cause I live there and that could mean actual consequences if people like Trump get in power and try to go after people that don’t agree with them.
I think CPU backdoors are just a theoratically possible thing with almost zero chance of happening or succeeding without anyone noticing or having massive consequences and would bring massive changes to the industry like open source makers sprouting up (because it would open up a market where the open aourc chips could be profitable) because if snapdragon really could do that i don’t think china will make phones with them . Also its not worth it because everything you could ever want could be scooped from users os/apps/sites and is far much easy/profitable/easier to get out scot free etc . Anyways i could be wrong about everything so take it with a grain of salt and feel free to correct me .
I’m not talking about the CPU itself. If I remember correctly, phones with Snapdragon CPUs usually have packages from qualcomm installed, and there have been reports about them sending data to qualcomm.
1 They do not say what they caught qualcomm with for no reason.
2 They have a header called sony and fairphone are affected and many more and continues to say thay until the end when they reveal they didn’t even test fairphone and just assumed it must be because they use qualcom chips too .
3 Why throw so much shade at fairphone like there are much more popular devices such as samsung and shit ? They also at the end boasts about their phone not using qualcomm and being more secure .
4 We don’t even know if that proprietry blob by qualcomm could be disabled or deleted and they didn’t even try it on better roms like graphene or anything and they should’ve tried if an android firewall could block it .
All in all nice article and i never trusted Qualcomm or any other hardware vendors who all hide behind proprietary hardwares anyway and no one should as they all will stab you in the back as soon as it is feasible i’m sure . I just don’t think hardware/cpu backdoor is tge way and had hope for qualcomm as they seemed to invest in RISC V a while back which nothing came of anyway . All in all fuck Qualcomm and everyone else .
Again i could be wrong about everything so take it with a grain of salt and feel free to correct me .
They seem to point at the qualcomm privacy policy to show what’s being collected. It does seem strange that they’re not analysing the packets themselves, especially since they’re claiming the data is unencrypted. The article is quite sensationalist, probably to help sell their very expensive (one might dare saying overpriced) Pixels with preinstalled Graphene.
It’s still good to keep in mind that qualcomm seems to be collecting personalised data, which they’d likely hand over to US intelligence or law enforcement if requested to, and that at least some custom roms come with the proprietary packages that facilitate this.
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