The current trend is to move from cash to electronic money controlled by the banks. Previously the money deposited to a bank account was the clients money that the bank just kept. Now it's the banks money that can be frozen by any reason and it's the client's responsibility to prove his innocence.
Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong".
Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.
> Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions
Which country is it? In many jurisdictions cash transactions are already illegal above certain threshold. It might be that you won't have too many places to go.
Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash.
Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
I once had this discussion with an economics person and pointed out that if my country moves to a card-only society, then I would move to using USD notes instead.
I'm sure I won't be the only one accepting USD notes as payment.
So really either all countries go card only or people just move to other currencies, at least for certain transactions.
Cash transactions over $10k have to be reported to the IRS. You'd have to provide ID and TIN. If that weren't the case, criminals wouldn't have had problems with money laundering.
For the past 10 years I've been travelling to Russia occasionally. Normally during a flight I like opening up my GPS app to check the location, altitude and speed of the aicraft.
About a year ago I noticed that shortly after crossing Russias border the GPS stopped working. Initially I thought it was a glitch, but after a few flights it became obvious that something was going on, probably the signal was baing jammed.
Interesting that close to landing when the altitude is lower than 200m, the signal is restored.
It's unclear to me how the plane is navigating though if the GPS is jammed. Very weird...
Planes have used inertial navigation for a long time. Adding GPS to that mix is relatively recent. GPS was never really intended to be used for navigation even though it can be and often is. There was no need for it to be particularly reliable when it was designed since the Soviets could easily kill it if they wanted to. It had a different purpose.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "not intended for navigation"? GPS was intended as a replacement for TRANSIT and LORAN, which have navigation literally in their names. It's also the textbook example on Wikipedia's satellite navigation page, and I can't imagine how precise geolocation somehow wouldn't be useful for navigation.
Also, the general analysis after KAL007 was that GPS should be made publicly available specifically to aid civilian navigation. They even identify what we call RAIM today to make it suitable for eventual usage as a primary navigation system.
GPS was trivially attackable from inception, that was not a design requirement given its purpose. The purpose of GPS was to precisely measure the planet in peacetime. A unique core capability of the US military is extremely precise INS technology, the capabilities and precision of which are closely guarded secrets and under continuous R&D. The precision of INS is dependent on the precision of your world model. GPS allowed extremely precise world models to be built globally, which provided the data model INS needs to be maximally effective. In wartime the GPS system can be killed by any near-peer adversary, but the damage has already been done to the extent inertial targeting systems have a precise model of the world.
No US military system relies on GPS for navigation. Military navigation systems use GPS as an untrusted source for fine-tuning inertial navigation within tight error bounds. Against US military systems, successfully spoofing GPS might buy you several meters of deviation. This only affects the cheapest US guidance systems, since most weapons have active terminal guidance. It is worth noting that GPS corrections are being phased out in US weapon systems, purportedly due to improvements in INS tech that moot the value of GPS corrections.
The tl;dr: GPS was developed to build a precise model of the world in peacetime that could be fed to inertial targeting and navigation systems in the complete absence of GPS. In that, it has been a massive success. US military systems have never relied on GPS for anything important. Contrary to popular media, the US has never produced GPS-guided weapons, even the cheapest systems are INS at their core.
Civilian systems use GPS for navigation, against its design, because they can mostly ignore its trivial susceptibility to hostile actors.
Most of the basic attacks against GPS also worked against TRANSIT, LORAN, OMEGA, and others, which were clearly used for military navigation. I'm not seeing the design differentiation with the systems that were guiding ships and missiles.
All US military navigation systems use INS pervasively for primary navigation. You can attack GPS, LORAN, etc and it won't affect their operations. This has been axiomatic in the design of those systems for many decades. US military ships are no different, also using INS for primary navigation. As with every other US military system, they can conditionally accept fine-tuning inputs from GPS and other untrusted sources of navigation data because why not. They use a lot of open source data sources, but they don't need them or trust them.
> It's unclear to me how the plane is navigating though if the GPS is jammed. Very weird...
RNAV (or aRea Navigation) based on VOR-DME has been a thing since (at least) the 1970's. You put in a waypoint based on a radial and distance from a navaid, and then the box in the cockpit would Do Math so you could follow a track to/from that virtual navaid.
Bendix even made a cute little box for small airplanes in the 1980's that allowed you to pre-store up to 4 (or 10) such waypoint-frequency tuples and cycle through them to approximate a straight path from your origin to destination, using navaids near (but not on) your route. Given the service volume of a typical VORs, the 10 waypoints could enable a flight segment of over 2,000 km before you needed to enter more waypoints.
Around the same time, the flight management systems in airliners began to have navaid databases, allowing you derive lat/lng from the angle and distance. They could even auto-select the best local navaid to use. That enabled DME-DME area navigation, which has ~10x better precision than VOR-DME.
The flight management systems in modern airlines of course still have these databases and support navigation by ground-based navaid.
Russia still operates their version of LORAN (Chayka), too, so that's another option. By the 1980's, LORAN receivers were pretty well automated and directly produced lat/lng outputs. LORAN has worse accuracy than GPS, about ~400 meters, but is still good enough to get you to the airport.
And, as several other people have mentioned, virtually all airliners continue to carry an INS.
I guess it would make sense if they were all jammed, though I'm not sure the fact that your phone didn't pick those up really proves this was the case? I have no idea how these work but I could totally imagine phones interpreting jammed signals differently from weak/nonexistent ones. Plus, I've had at least one that nominally supported all of those but in practice didn't really feel that way. You're probably right, just not sure you can deduce it from your phone in particular.
It’s definitely not true. Elon way overpaid for Twitter and even tried to back out. Twitter was also in poor financial shape and it was losing money. Frankly after this many years I couldn’t see it as a growth stock.
Twitter was losing $200 million/year in 2021 IIRC.
Taking a $13 Billion loan and therefore being charged $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments means its going down the Xitter faster than ever before. The amount of loan-payments Twitter had to make this year alone dwarfs the losses Twitter had over the past decade.
The best interview that I ever experienced was when I applied for a Software Engineer position at VMware. The interviewers brought a laptop with an IDE and a project with a bunch of source code (based on one of their real in-house projects), and the task was to understand the exising code base and add a few new features to it.
A real everyday task, no crazy algorithms or other menthal gymnastics.
Assuming an interview is a typical 30-60 min time slot is this actually a realistic ask? It seems pretty crazy to 1) get up to speed on a codebase and context in such a short amount of time to 2) then be able to actually develop against the codebase in a meaningful way to add more than one feature to it.
Can you share any additional details about what the process actually looked like or what type of task you were actually performing in the interview? Size of the project (~LoC), tech stack, complexity of the feature, etc.
2 hours slot was allocated for that task. There was an API that I had to use to perform some operations and that made the task easier, as there was no need to study the entire code. C was used as the programming language, with a few thousands lines of code total. I completed the task in 2 hours successfully. I liked the fact that this method required zero preparations from the candidates side, and tested the actual abilities to code, as opposed to solving abstract problems.
Recently I opened an IRA account at Fidelity. I had my 401k with them for more than a decade. Soon after I opened it they locked my account demanding ID and papers proving my residential address. I'm not sure what else they may request, but fact is I can't use my hard earned funds at this moment.
I experienced similar locks at a bunch of other websites. It looks to be a norm nowadays to randomly lock accounts. Now if similar things start to happen to bank accounts and retirement funds it's easy to understand that it will ruin people's lifes.
Bottom line is - we shouldn't fully rely on electronic money. I will do everything to avoid living in a cashless society.
Fidelity had my 403b account listed under the address of some Brazilian guy who worked for Microsoft when I logged in one time. There’s a reason they do that.
There's plenty of STM32 of any flavor in China. Alibaba is a good source. There may be fakes though, but reputable resellers (pay attention to reviews and tenure) normally sell genuine chips.
I've gotten some Blue Pills with (properly labeled) CKS32s on them, which might be of lesser quality, but I've also seen people reporting getting Blue Pills with (properly labeled) GD32s, which are higher quality than the ST part, at least in the sense that they run successfully at higher clock speeds. (I couldn't tell you if they have more problems turning on many peripherals at close-together times, or if they have more noise on their ADCs, or something.)
You have to research the counterfeit market for each chip/product series. There's no hard and fast rule for their quality because many of them come from the same factories that make the real chips when unscrupulous fabs have shadow shifts manufacturing their clients' designs for themselves or just straight up copy and rebrand it.
Absolutely agree. The amount of hate increased significantly over the last few decades. A lot of people became absolutely intolerant to other's views. Many of my friends stopped talking about politics, because it quickly becomes drama. I don't remember society being so divided before. This is very concerning.
Absolutely agree. And one more thing that looked incomprehensible just a short while ago was that Russia could completely shut down the gas flow to Europe (Russia needs money for the war in the end, so why would it do it?). However it seems quite a possible scenario as of now. Stakes became quite high, and unfortunately very little (if any) work is carried to stop the conflict and start negotiations.
Next step is a blockchain-based crypto, controlled only by a single structure, such as Fed. Total control directly by the government, no banks involved. Full access to the history of all purchases and means to immediately lock out anyone who does anything "wrong".
Personally I'm going to move out of the country as soon as it forbids the cash transactions, as I don't want my kids to be slaves to the government.