"Everyone should learn how to manage trust funds," says scion of billionaire family dynasty mostly known for smoking crack and throwing business cards at people while shouting the n-word.
If you get under the hood of Mangione's actual history and ideology, the guy was an Effective Altruist insider. Not some Far-Left Antifa Radical, but a staunch techbro anarcho-libertarian who initially sympathized with Balaji Srinivasan's Network State and Peter Thiel's vision of fully capitalist Start Up Cities.
He'd never have normally registered on a dragnet like this.
But, more importantly, he's a near-singular instance of vigilante violence against a business executive. To say "it never works", you need to ignore the enormous security apparatus surrounding Fortune 100 senior executives. And the relative infrequency of these attempts in general. Since Thompson, there hasn't been some wave of executive assassinations. The closest we've seen was another lone wolf shooting of Charlie Kirk. Has a billionaire ever been deliberately targeted and killed... ever?
Whether it is through a reasonably robust security state, a militantly apathetic public, or the general anonymity of business executives, the real physical risk to billionaires and their CEO stogies appears to be nearly zero.
This is all very bad. But, much like with the tools used during the War on Terror to track "potential terrorists", I suspect this system has a problem of excessive false positives and false correlations.
Historically, the response to this kind of data sweep was not to target people based on the information but to justify targeting of people after the fact. Also, the FBI made a habit of setting out honeypots for (typically mentally ill or extremely naive) would-be radicals or even radicalization programs intended to foment prosecutable misconduct where none had existed.
In 2008, FBI-paid informant Shahed Hussain met James Cromitie in the parking lot of a mosque in Newburgh, New York, a town with a high poverty rate and large Muslim community. (Cromitie was not part of the compassionate release request that has set the other three free.) Hussain befriended Cromitie, a down and out petty drug dealer. Hussain claims to have told Cromitie that he was a member of a terrorist organization in Pakistan, which Cromitie allegedly expressed interest in joining. In subsequent recorded conversations, Cromitie made hateful antisemitic remarks, but according to evidence presented during the trial in 2011, when Hussain encouraged him to “make a plan, pick a target, find recruits, . . . procure guns, and conduct surveillance,” Cromitie did nothing. Hussain sought to motivate Cromitie by assuring him he would be rewarded in the afterlife for a jihadist attack, to no avail.
Hussain began offering more significant financial incentives for executing an attack, including promising Cromitie a BMW and cash, but Cromitie remained uninspired, taking no action to develop an attack plan. Even FBI agents thought that Cromitie was “unlikely to commit an act without the support of the FBI source.” Hussain’s enticements became more extravagant, including offering to pay Cromitie $250,000, an unauthorized inducement the FBI captured on a wiretap. Apparently tempted by the big payoff, Cromitie accompanied Hussian to scope out a potential target, but thereafter avoided Hussain and his persistent attempts to resume contact.
Cromitie avoided Hussain for almost two months. After losing his job and desperate for money, he reinitiated contact with Hussain and agreed to plot an attack. At Hussain’s urging, Cromitie recruited other Muslim men, David Williams, Onta Williams (no relation), and Laguerre Payen, to serve as lookouts. Like Cromitie, they too were impoverished with histories of petty drug crimes and mental illness. With the four men along for the ride, the informant Hussain pushed the scheme forward, selecting a synagogue and U.S. Air Force base as targets and driving the defendants across state lines (to ensure federal jurisdiction) to pick up mock weapons arranged by the FBI.
If these programs are allowed to run their course, I suspect we'll see similar stories springing up as less ideologically motivated judges recoil at investigations and prosecutions where the crimes themselves are entirely orchestrated by the investigating agencies.
I studied things without technology. I take notes on pen and paper
It's weird that we don't consider the mass production of cheap paper and quality pens/pencils a technology.
analog classrooms work better than this chromebook hellhole
I'm not going to become an Evangelical for Ctrl+F because I don't think it's worth the fight.
But I will say an analog classroom with 8 students taught by a professional teacher five days a week is vastly superior to an analog classroom with 40 students taught by a TA three days a week.
Isn’t it incredible that “AI” is sold as a product that is ‘PhD level smart’ (lol), but if it doesn’t do the straightforward thing you asked of it then it’s your fault.
I personally wish Crockett and Talarico weren’t running against each other, so that they could focus on Cornyn/Paxton/Hunt instead
The GOP is having its own night of the long knives. I wouldn't lose too much sleep.
But yes, the local repubs are calling it an existential threat to Christ-fearin’ ‘muricans, and how if they get in power there will be Sharia law and cats and dogs living together, etc
It's a powerful message. Just ask NYC Mayor Andrew Cuomo
There's a website tool hosted on neocities that's attempting to become a geocities revival.
The video is functionally an ad for the community and the associated Web building tools.
Another walled garden, right in line with Web 2.0, but with a 90s pastiche done up in HTML5. Reminds me a bit of the Vaporwave style that flared up in the mid-10s. Cute, but not groundbreaking.
Crazy how a free market capitalist model for electricity isn't targeting these enormous inflexible energy consumers for exorbitant rates.
Have we forgotten how to turn a profit in this country? Gouge! Gouge! Gouge! They've got a few billion worth of hardware in the ground and money to burn. You've got nothing to lose.
Conservative Media: "Trump is arresting all the criminals. Here are some of the (AI generated) criminals Trump has recently arrested. Aren't you glad these people are no longer in the United States?"
Conservative Voters: "Wow, great job, I love this news"
Actual ICE official: incoherent screaming at your husband
Subset of Conservative Voters Experiencing This Personally: "This is not what the TV told me would happen"
Now I guess we get to find out if the subset is big enough to shift the elections, despite CBS getting added to the pile of reactionary propaganda.
"Everyone should learn how to manage trust funds," says scion of billionaire family dynasty mostly known for smoking crack and throwing business cards at people while shouting the n-word.