[spdrun]

Let’s hope things get crazy this year. Here’s to crazy. Drink!

[spdrun]

Spdrun, creepy but there’s no getting around the surveillance state. If you use CC, your movements can be tracked during the day. Phone companies and even stores look at your unique phone wifi MAC address to track your visits.

No law mandating use of a crap card for offline purchases or carrying an e-leash around all of the time. Just saying…

[spdrun]

I think there’s also a trend to police not being as “proactive”, where it can be seen as brutal. This is probably a good thing. Ten years ago, they might have been hauled off to jail at the slightest pretext.

[spdrun]

I’ve fallen off more than once, most recently when a piece of metal sliced my front tire open on a rural road — wear a helmet and keep at it.

[spdrun]

Treadmill? What’s that? Bugger the idea of running like a hamster on a wheel. Road bikes are where it’s AT!

[spdrun]

If you’re reading email online, it should absolutely be encrypted via SSL at minimum. If you’re viewing confidential information, same. If you’re viewing a basic informational website with minimal interaction, WGAS?

[spdrun]

Unnecessarily alarmist. It’s only an issue if you’re sending info or viewing private info, not just viewing public info.

[spdrun]

If that’s true, that seems a little too convenient, in addition to the note in Arabic on the unexploded pressure cooker. Which brings me back to Mr. van der Lubbe burning down the Reichstag.

Either the world’s biggest moron or a patsy.

[spdrun]

Just to be clear, NYPD did not collect Rahmani. They collected evidence and dissiminated info in concert with Feds and media. Local police in Linden, NJ caught up with the guy after he was found asleep in front of a bar.

Other than for the wounded, this would have been a comedy of errors. (The story is stranger than I described, and involves random thieves and homeless people finding bombs. He also managed to blow up a garbage can at the beach. Barely.)

[spdrun]

It was pretty amazing that in NYC/NJ it took less than 24 hours to find and capture that guy that decided to blow things up over the weekend. That suggests to me, we’re doing a pretty good job on things.
…
What was the complaint about the NSA again? Seems to me they are doing the job they are suppose to be doing.

Wrong. Zero to do with the NSA and intrusive surveillance, everything to do with police work and luck. As far as I know, it went like this:

(1) Device went off on 23rd Street, NYC
(2) Device did not go off on 27th Street, NYC
(3) Fingerprint was found on the unexploded device
(4) Fingerprint was matched to Mr. Rahmani, who had previous police contact
(5) An alert (including emergency alert to phones) went out about Rahmani, who was found sleeping on a street in a nearby NJ town.
(6) Rahmani was also caught on video tossing the bombs in a trash bin in a NJ train station

If anything, this is an argument for hiring competent detectives in local police, not for more scouring of personal communications by the Feds. Or for more tracking of people, video surveillance, etc. He would have been caught as easily in 1999 as now.

All of those things failed to uncover Rahmani’s plans. Same with the Boston bombers. Both were found by a combination of luck, the human need for sleep, and old-fashioned quality police work.

Cue conspiracy theories that he’s a patsy who was put up to it in order to disrupt the elections. Trump now has a terror attack to blame on the Dems being soft on terror — he stands to benefit from this. The whole thing with no deaths, a bunch of unexploded bombs, evidence left behind, etc, might seem a bit too good to be true for some people.

Guy strikes me as more of a Lee Harvey Oswald putz than an Osama Bin Laden mastermind type.

[spdrun]

T-mo prepaid is 10 cents per minute (min $3 per month). For under 100 minutes, you should be paying under $10/mo.

BTW. I would not get a flip phone. I’d get a candybar. Flip phones used to break at the hinge all of the time.

[spdrun]

There will also be a day of reckoning for China and unfortunately we’ll probably feel it here in the USA as well.

fortunately

[spdrun]

If the whole world reaches present US living standards and energy consumption, it would be an ecological disaster. Goal should be a population of 500 million inside a century or two, heavily supported using automation and sustainable/nuclear energy. Basically turn the Earth into a pleasure garden for lotus eaters.

[spdrun]

We can’t have a population of over 7 billion on this planet and expect to consume resources at the present rate.

We either need to go for more sustainability (energy sources, make durable goods truly durable) or we need to have a lower population in the long term. Otherwise, clean air, clean water, land without diseases and with a good climate, will become things to fight over. We’ll run the real risk that population reduction will happen through nuclear war or worse.

[spdrun]

The world would benefit more through something like Zika spreading and rendering 90% of humans infertile for a generation. Drop the human population down to 500 million inside of a century.

Things stopping and people becoming too concerned about the immediate to want to raise a family would actually be a good thing, not bad.

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